One Life to Give

Martyrdom and the Making of the American Revolution

John Fanestil

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781506474144
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506474151
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The famous words of patriots, such as Nathan Hale's "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country," have echoed through the centuries as embodiments of the spirit of the American Revolution. Despite the immortalized role these quotes play in America's historical narrative, their origins remain obscure. We know little about what inspired words like these and how this spirit of sacrifice inspired the revolution itself. What was going on in the hearts and minds of young men who risked their lives for the revolutionary cause? The answer lies in the untold story of the spiritual backdrop of the American Revolution.

One Life to Give presents Nathan Hale's execution on September 21, 1776, as the culmination of a story that spans generations and explains why many young American men reached the personal decision to commit to the revolutionary cause even if it meant death. As John Fanestil reveals, this is the story of how martyrdom shaped the American Revolution.

In colonial America, countless young revolutionaries, like their forebears, were raised and trained from infancy to understand that divine approval was attached to certain kinds of deaths--deaths of self-sacrifice for a sacred cause. Young boys were taught to expect that someday they might be called to fight and die for such a cause, and that should this come to pass, their deaths could be meaningful in the eyes of others and of God. Fanestil traces the deep history of the tradition of martyrdom from its classical and Christian origins, ultimately articulating how the spirit of American martyrdom animated countless personal commitments to American independence, and thereby to the war. Only by understanding the inextricable role played by martyrdom can we fully understand the origins of the American Revolution.

1

To Play the Man

English Protestant Martyrdom and the Core Curriculum of New England Martyrology

The first generations of English to colonize New England set out to establish communities grounded in the pure Christian faith. New England’s Puritans traced their spiritual heritage back through a long line of martyrs to the self-sacrificing death of Jesus himself, and so they brought with them across the Atlantic—and then continued to import from London—print material drenched in the interrelated themes of mortality and martyrdom. Puritans considered these materials to be supplements and complements to the Bible, which they, like their Protestant forebears, embraced as containing the rule of everyday life. These materials reinforced a consistent message: the fundamental spiritual challenge confronting every individual was that of preparing to die, and in this challenge, Christian martyrs down through the ages were the quintessential guides.1 As Michael Wigglesworth described in his Day of Doom, the spectacularly popular “poetical description of the great and last judgment,” when the dead stood before the throne of the eternal kingdom, they would find seated at Christ’s right hand the martyrs who most closely resembled him:

His holy Martyrs, who

For his dear Name suffering shame,

Calamity and woe.

Like Champions stood, & with their Blood

Their testimony sealed;

Whose innocence without offence,

To Christ their Judge appealed.2

Rightly perceiving that the survival of their colonial experiments was fraught with peril, and eager to confirm that their loved ones had not died in vain, Puritan clergy in early New England anxiously cast their experience in light of this treasured spiritual inheritance, the inheritance of English Protestant martyrdom.3

Taught by bitter firsthand experience that death could come calling at any time, the early Puritans in New England were determined to teach their children to prepare for death at the earliest possible age.4 Specifically, they taught them to read the Bible and a core group of supplemental texts through modes of repetition, recitation (reading aloud), and memorization.5 On the one hand, this catechetical practice was content driven, the goal being for the young reader to learn by heart a core body of knowledge deemed necessary for salvation.6 On the other hand, these texts were more than mere reading material. Through an unending cycle of lived experience, prayerful and improvisational reading, and oral and written reflection, devout Puritans sought to participate in what they conceived of as a divine action of incarnation.7 They understood themselves to be partakers in what they called the “living Word,” a transcendent power they experienced not just in the Bible but in many kinds of texts. In their persistent references to martyrdom, Puritans were not merely “writing about” or “reading about” the martyrs. Rather, they were engaged in catechetical and devotional practices that were foundational and formative to their identities. They were raising generation after generation of would-be martyrs.

The foundations of what would become the sweeping cultural tradition of American martyrdom were laid in New England, and Boston was its undisputed cornerstone.8 While continuing to import Bibles and larger, more complex works from London, Bostonians began to produce locally a short list of steady sellers—psalmbooks, primers, catechisms, and almanacs.9 These books also introduced readers, especially early readers and readers coming of age, to the spiritual trials of dying and to their inheritance of English Protestant martyrdom. Over time, as a colonial print enterprise was birthed, leading Boston clergy worked in collaboration with printers and booksellers to curate what would become a core curriculum for a distinctive New England brand of martyrology.10 The works composing this core curriculum would remain among the most widely published books in colonial America, straight down through to the American Revolution. Familiarity with this core curriculum is as important to understanding the upbringing of America’s Revolutionary generations as familiarity with the works of Disney media is to understanding the experience of American children today.

English Protestant Martyrdom and the Power of the Printed Word

Rightful claim to the ancient Christian tradition of martyrdom was hotly contested across early modern Europe, both Catholic and Protestant. In England, even as the national church separated from Rome, Anglicans clung to the tradition, adding from their own number to the ever-unfolding lineage of Catholic saints and martyrs.11 English Protestants, meanwhile, embraced the tradition of Christian martyrdom with distinct fervor, as they rejected the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, anathematized its prelate (the pope), and waged war against those English monarchs they perceived to be too loyal to Rome. Generations of English Protestant clergymen produced written works saturated in interrelated themes of mortality and martyrdom. As they sat at their desks—the Bible on one side and paper, pen, and ink on the other—they attempted to write themselves, their congregants, and their children into the story of God’s salvation. All produced diaries, devotionals, sermons, and correspondence that touched routinely on questions of death. The more capable and connected among them, working collaboratively with printers, saw to it that the fruit of their pens reached larger audiences, addressing questions of death as a matter of course. They published accounts of deaths and other works memorializing their dead. They published essays and polemical works, arguing over the true meaning of death and disputing the best strategies for confronting it. They published catechisms, sermons, and works of liturgy, making clear that, in their view, the preparation for death was the fundamental spiritual challenge confronting every human being.

The way these English Protestant clergymen thought about it, their words connected them mysteriously, across a span of generations, to the lives and deaths of their Protestant forebears, to the lives and deaths of the early Christian martyrs, and to the life and death of Jesus himself. They understood themselves, as was articulated in their sacred Scripture, to be “compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses,” and so they set their sights on Jesus, “the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:1–2). The word translated into English as “witnesses” was martyrios in the Greek of the New Testament, a language in which they were well schooled. The resulting corpus of print production communicated that the self-sacrificing deaths of the martyrs were the highest, and paradigmatic, expressions of true Christian faith and that following in their footsteps was the surest path to salvation from the overwhelming power of death.

Across these same centuries, English-speaking Protestants came to consider the medium of print as endowed with a certain transcendence—as suggested powerfully by the moniker they gave to the King James Bible, “the word of God.” The first printing press was established in London in 1476, and the new technology quickly revolutionized the ways that English-speaking peoples thought about death and the way they engaged with their martyrs. As English Protestants came to understand it, the miracle of print and the witness of the martyrs combined to hold out the possibility that the truth contained in the Christian Scriptures could be made transparent and available to all. Especially as the Bible became more and more widely available in the seventeenth century, many began to use the Scriptures—and related materials like catechisms—to teach their children to read.12 They also taught their very young that they might be called soon to their deaths and that if they were so called, theirs could prove important deaths, deaths that would be meaningful in the eyes of others and meaningful in the eyes of God.

As printing technologies improved and books became more widely available, Bibles, catechisms, psalters, and other books were reduced in size, eventually so much so that they could be held in the palm of a hand. Amazed at this technological miracle, English Protestants became transfixed by their cherished printed books, much as readers in the twenty-first century are transfixed by their handheld devices. Over time, the English became much more than mere readers of print—they came to use print material not just for reading silently and reading aloud, and not just for teaching and learning, but also for praying, singing, preaching, worshiping, writing, meditating, and so on. In this way, the tradition of English Protestant martyrdom came to involve much more than reading about or learning about the martyrs. Rather, this manifold use of print material became a foundational catechetical practice aimed at instructing especially the young in how to confront life’s central challenge—that is, how to contend with the power of sin and death. All who participated in the production, distribution, and use of this kind of print material—authors, printers, people involved in the sale and distribution of printed material, and consumers—were engaged in a conscious, ritualized religious practice aimed at instructing and informing right conduct in individuals and maintaining right order in churches and other, including national, communities. At every level, there was no clearer measure of right conduct than the conduct of martyrs in the face of the prospect of death.13

The most enduring expression of English Protestant martyrdom is, without doubt, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days, Touching Matters of the Church.14 First published in 1563, Foxe’s monumental work chronicled over 280 instances of Protestants being burned at the stake during the brief, five-year rule of England’s Catholic Queen Mary I (1553–58), a reign of terror for which her opponents nicknamed her “Bloody Mary.”15 In what came to be known simply as the Book of Martyrs, Foxe crafted his tales, many accompanied by woodcut illustrations, as substitutes for the Roman Catholic legends of the medieval saints, piling them one on top of the next, casting them always against a scriptural backdrop.16 Among the most familiar profiles was that of William Tyndale, famously burned at the stake by King Henry VIII in 1536 for translating the Bible into English. Foxe attributed to Tyndale the dying words “Lord—open the King of England’s eyes,” conjuring countless stories from Scripture.17

The world portrayed by Foxe was an epic and all-encompassing struggle between good and evil, between life and death. Protestant martyrs like Tyndale were defenders of true Christian “liberty” against “tyranny of three kinds, viz., that which enslaves the person, that which seizes the property, and that which prescribes and dictates to the mind.” Foxe labeled this third kind “ecclesiastical tyranny” and deemed it the “worst kind of tyranny, as it includes the other two sorts.” The Catholic popes were the very epitome of this total tyranny, which was in turn the true desire of the “Romish clergy” who “not only do torture the bodies and seize the effects of those they persecute, but take the lives, torment the minds, and, if possible, would tyrannize over the souls of the unhappy victims.”18 Foxe lauded John Wycliffe, another translator of Scripture whose “observant mind penetrated into the constitution and policy of Rome.” Before his martyrdom, Foxe explained, Wycliffe “inveighed in his lectures, against the pope—his usurpation—his infallibility—his pride—his avarice—and his tyranny”: “He was the first who termed the pope Antichrist. From the pope, he would turn to the pomp, the luxury and trappings of the bishops, and compared them with the simplicity of primitive bishops. Their superstitions and deceptions were topics that he urged with energy of mind and logical precision.”19 In Foxe’s understanding, true Chri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. To Play the Man: English Protestant Martyrdom and the Core Curriculum of New England Martyrology
• 2. The Spirit of the Martyrs Revived: The Varied Spread of English Protestant Martyrdom in Colonial America
• 3. Join or Die: The Birthing of an American Brand of Martyrdom in the French and Indian War
• 4. An Aggravated Tyranny: American Martyrdom and the Raising of a Revolutionary Generation
• 5. Patriotism, This Noble Affection: American Martyrdom and the Revolutionaries’ Coming-of-Age
• 6. Liberty or Death: American Martyrdom in the Continental Congresses
• 7. Nathan Hale: An Exemplary American Martyr
• Conclusion: American Martyrdom, the American Revolution, and Us
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index