abstract: The American War for Independence, then, was an effort at regaining what had been until the mid-1700s a free society enjoying a substantial amount of self-rule. It is more accurately described as a secession, a withdrawing from the British Empire, conducted under duress.

Skip Navigation

by Timothy Terrell

Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, fifty-six men risked their lives and their fortunes to sign a document asserting the independence of the American colonists from Great Britain. This "Declaration of Independence" directed the attention of the world to the tyranny of the British Crown and justified the force of arms to reclaim self-rule.

Achieving freedom came at a heavy price for these signers. Nine of the fifty-six died from wounds suffered while fighting British troops. Five were captured by the British and were tortured to death. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons in the Continental Army, and two others had their sons captured. The Virginian Carter Braxton, a wealthy planter and trader, lost his ships to the British Navy. Forced to sell his lands and home to pay his debts, he died in rags. Thomas McKean was required to move his family constantly to keep them from the British. He served in the Continental Congress without pay and lost all his possessions during the war. Vandals or soldiers looted the homes of Clymer, Ellery, Gwinnett, Hall, Heyward, Middleton, and Rutledge. Thomas Nelson saw his home destroyed in the battle at Yorktown, and died bankrupt. John Hart was driven from his dying wife's bedside. His thirteen children were forced to flee, and his crops and gristmill were destroyed. For over a year he lived in forests and caves, returning after the war to find his wife dead and his children gone. Soon after, he died from exhaustion and a broken heart.

For what cause did these men fight? What led them to sacrifice their fortunes, their homes, their families, and their lives? It is not lightly that men would give up these things. The answer is: 1) a deep desire to live in a free society with basic rights of life, liberty, and property, and 2) a firm belief in constitutional self-rule. Both of these were rooted in the biblical precepts of the Protestant Reformation.

Life, Liberty, and Property

The right to life is essential to a free society. Without this most fundamental of human rights, still denied to millions of people the world over, the state is no longer a protector but an oppressor. Obviously, early Americans envisioned circumstances in which there could be a justified taking of life, such as capital punishment, but no one was to "be deprived of life...without due process of law."

Liberty is simply the freedom to act as one will to seek fortune or pleasure or contentment. Government control over the activities, wealth, education, dwelling, career, or any other part of human life is a constraint on liberty. Early Americans saw that certain governmental functions were set forth in Scripture, and thus not all state coercion would be a deprivation of a biblically conceived liberty. Modern American society, however, has expanded the role of government far beyond its biblical limits, such that the liberty the framers envisioned for U.S. citizens has been lost.

Fundamental to a free society is the basic right of property. Though this right is routinely trammeled today, to the framers it was inconceivable that this right would not exist in a free nation. Wrote John Adams,

Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.... The moment, the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If Thou Shalt Not Covet , and Thou Shalt Not Steal, were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.1

Without the right of private property, a society will not grow and prosper. If the government will not stop my neighbor from taking what I have produced, I will not bother to produce. Not only are incentives corrupted, but the economy turns into chaos. Early in the 20th century, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out that an economy without private property and a free-market price system will fail for lack of information about how to allocate resources. An economic system with few or nonexistent private property rights will collapse just as the Soviet Union did a decade ago.

Safeguarding Rights

Some of the framers did not consider it necessary to enumerate the rights of the people, believing that to do so would be superfluous and even counterproductive. What we now know as the Bill of Rights was strongly opposed by Hamilton and Madison in the Federalist and in private correspondence. For Englishmen, rights were not completely spelled out in written law, but were embodied in the tradition of common law. The Constitution itself was a minimalist document, incorporating within it "in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A Bill of Rights."2 In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Madison wrote,

[E]xperience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights on those occasions when its control is most needed. Repeated violations of the parchment barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every state. In Virginia I have seen the bill of rights violated in every instance where it has been opposed to a popular current.3

In the Federalist , Hamilton wrote,

I...affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to the powers which are not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulatory power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power.4

The best safeguard of natural human rights is a decentralized civil government limited by a biblical constitution. Throwing off the control of a tyrannical power is not in itself enough to guarantee a free society. This is clearly seen in the case of the French Revolution. Having destroyed the monarchy, the revolutionaries failed to set up a satisfactory government. Robespierre's anti-Christian Reign of Terror was the unfortunate result.

The Secession of 1776

The French Revolution was truly a revolution. In that it differed from the American War for Independence, which was actually not a revolution, at least as commonly conceived. A revolution implies the overthrow of authority--a sudden radical change in political organization. This was not what the Americans set out to do. The framers saw the war with Great Britain as a last resort following many humble entreaties for justice before the throne. Americans were not seeking a new and different way of life, or a new and different government. They desired only to keep the kind of representative government that had prevailed in the Colonies for a century and a half. If any revolution occurred, it was a British revolution.

It is not well recognized today that the so-called American Revolution was a contest over jurisdiction. After the Glorious Revolution in England (1689-1690), Parliament enjoyed increased royal power in England, power it assumed applied to the colonies as well. However, the colonies were directly under the King by virtue of their royal charters, not under Parliament. Virtually every document carrying a colonial protest to King George bore some appeal to these original charters. Parliament had no more jurisdiction over America than Massachusetts has over South Carolina. The colonies had their own elected legislatures that predated the Glorious Revolution, and had no intention of following the orders of a usurping foreign assembly. In 1775, in his Novanglus, John Adams attempted to settle the jurisdictional question once and for all. By what law, he asked rhetorically, did the English Parliament obtain sovereignty over America?

By the law of God, in the Old and New Testament, it has none; by the law of nature and nations, it has none; by the common law of England, it has none, for the common law and the authority of Parliament founded on it never extended beyond the four seas; by statute law it has none, for no statute was made before the settlement of the colonies for this purpose; and the Declaratory Act, made in 1766, was made without our consent.

If King George had stepped in to protect the colonies from Parliament's encroachments, there would have been no war in 1776. Instead of honoring the colonial charters, however, King George sided with Parliament to tax, harass, and abuse the American colonies, until in 1776 the colonists could declare that "the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."

Why then does the Declaration of Independence not make this jurisdictional issue a focal point? It must be understood that the Declaration was a foreign policy instrument before it was any reflection of the colonists' philosophical position.5 The Declaration was intended to convince the French king, Louis XVI, to enter the war on the side of the colonists. Harping on what might seem to be philosophical radicalism would not have the desired effect, so Jefferson and the other authors instead engaged in a point-by-point exposé of King George's illegal activities.

The American War for Independence, then, was an effort at regaining what had been until the mid-1700s a free society enjoying a substantial amount of self-rule. It is more accurately described as a secession, a withdrawing from the British Empire, conducted under duress. The King had broken Britain's contracts--the charters--with the colonies, and the colonists demanded a political divorce. War resulted, but it was a war for independence, not a war of revolution. After its successful conclusion, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention attempted to frame a federal government that would perform its limited duties while respecting the authority of the individual states.

"Cousin America Has Run off with a Presbyterian Parson!"

Key to the framers' understanding of the need for self-rule and strictly limited federal government was their religious background. American society was theologically homogeneous, most of the nation having come from the Protestant regions of Europe. Though some Americans deviated from orthodox Christianity, the religion of the colonies was, in confession and practice, commonly Reformed and Calvinistic. Christianity was the center of the colonials' lives, a unifying element that served as the foundation for not only worship, but political opinion and law. Attempting to understand the American founding without considering the faith of the citizenry would be like trying to understand the movements of the planets without considering the sun. Russell Kirk, not one to be suspected of Calvinist sympathies, wrote,

In colonial America, everyone with the rudiments of schooling knew one book thoroughly: The Bible. And the Old Testament mattered as much as the New, for the American colonies were founded in a time of renewed Hebrew scholarship, and the Calvinistic character of Christian faith in early America emphasized the legacy of Israel....

John Calvin's Hebrew scholarship, and his expounding of the doctrine of sin and human depravity, impressed the Old Testament aspect of Christianity more strongly upon America than upon European states or other lands where Christians were in the majority.6

Calvinism as a doctrine was of course not universally held by early Americans, yet even Arminians and Roman Catholics could not help but absorb some Calvinist social thought. The French Huguenot (i.e., Calvinist) work Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants, 1579), which was widely read in the colonies before the War for Independence, defended the right of the colonists to take up arms and secede from Great Britain. The ruler himself is subject to the law, Calvinist pastors taught from their pulpits, any one who resists a law-breaking ruler is not a rebel but a protector of the law. The influence that the colonial churches, especially Presbyterian churches, exerted before and during the war was more than circumstantial; it was decisive. Boettner wrote,

So intense, universal and aggressive were the Presbyterians in their zeal for liberty that the war was spoken of in England as "The Presbyterian Rebellion." An ardent colonial supporter of King George III wrote home: "I fix all the blame for these extraordinary proceedings upon the Presbyterians. They have been the chief and principal instruments in all these flaming measures. They always do and ever will act against the government from that restless and turbulent anti-monarchical spirit which has always distinguished them everywhere." When the news of "these extraordinary proceedings" reached England, Prime Minister Horace Walpole said in Parliament, "Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson."7

It was Calvinism's biblical view of human nature that prompted the Framers to block human ambition with the checks and balances of the Constitution. While recognizing the potential for good, the writers of the Constitution believed that there existed, in the words of Madison, "a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust."8 Hamilton noted that "men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious,"9 and consequently should be restrained when holding public office. Thomas Jefferson pointed out that:

Free government is founded on jealousy, not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power. In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.10

Conclusion

Why, then, did the early Americans fight? Why did they set up a new constitutional republic? Their sacrifices were attempts to achieve freedom for themselves, their families, and their descendants, so that on this continent the rights of life, liberty, and property--biblically understood--would be secure. In stark contrast to the atheistic French Revolution, the American founding occurred in a Calvinistic setting that contributed to a firm belief in constitutionally limited government. If we lose this understanding of our history, if we forget the importance of biblically limited earthly authority, we risk losing the freedoms our forefathers secured for us.

Timothy D. Terrell is an assistant professor of economics at Wofford College, a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church in Simpsonville, SC, and director of the Center for Biblical Law and Economics (CBLE is online at the Patrick Henry Institute website: www.christcollege.org/html/phi/). Dr. Terrell can be contacted at terrelltd@wofford.edu.

Endnotes

1. The Works of John Adams, vol. VI, 281.

2. Federalist 84, 515.

3. Letter from Madison to Jefferson, October 17, 1788, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian Boyd, ed., vol. XIV, 19.

4. Federalist 84, 513-14.

5. On the Declaration of Independence, see William O. Einwechter, "The Declaration of Independence and National Renewal," Jeffrey A. Ziegler, "The Declaration of Independence: Christian Masterpiece or Humanist Tripe," and Kevin L. Clauson, "The Declaration of Independence as Moral and Constitutional Law: Whatever Happened to the Bible?" all in The Christian Statesman, vol. 143, no. 4 (July-August 2000).

6. Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (Open Court, 1974), 45-47.

7. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed [1932] 1972), 383-384.

8. Federalist 55, 346.

9. Ibid., 6, 54.

10. Resolution Relative to the Alien and Sedition Laws (1798).

back to top