Father of Liberty

Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution

Patrick Mullins

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700624485, 9780700624485
• eBook ISBN: 9780700624492
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Dr. Jonathan Mayhew (1720–1766) was, according to John Adams, a “transcendental genius . . . who threw all the weight of his great fame into the scale of the country in 1761, and maintained it there with zeal and ardor till his death.” He was also, J. Patrick Mullins contends, the most politically influential clergyman in eighteenth-century America and the intellectual progenitor of the American Revolution in New England. Father of Liberty is the first book to fully explore Mayhew’s political thought and activism, understood within the context of his personal experiences and intellectual influences, and of the cultural developments and political events of his time. Analyzing and assessing his contributions to eighteenth-century New England political culture, the book demonstrates Mayhew’s critical contribution to the intellectual origins of the American Revolution.

As pastor of the Congregationalist West Church in Boston, Mayhew championed the principles of natural rights, constitutionalism, and resistance to tyranny in press and pulpit from 1750 to 1766. He did more than any other clergyman to prepare New England for disobedience to British authority in the 1760s—and should, Mullins argues, be counted alongside such framers and fomenters of revolutionary thought as James Otis, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams. Though many commentators from John Adams on down have acknowledged his importance as a popularizer of Whig political principles, Father of Liberty is the first extended, in-depth examination of Mayhew’s political writings, as well as the cultural process by which he engaged with the public and disseminated those principles. As such, even as the book restores a key figure to his place in American intellectual and political history, it illuminates the meaning of the Revolution as a political and constitutional conflict informed by the religious and political ideas of the British Enlightenment.

1

The Right of Private Judgment

At his Harvard College commencement in July 1792, a young Bostonian named Thomas Paine—no relation to the famous pamphleteer—recited his poem, The Nature and Progress of Liberty. When he addressed the origins of the American Enlightenment, Paine solemnly intoned:

Then mental freedom first her power displayed,

And called a Mayhew to religion’s aid.

For this dear truth, he boldly led the van,

That private judgment was the right of man.

Mayhew disdained that soul-contracting view

Of sacred truth, which zealous Frenzy drew;

He sought religion’s fountain head to drink,

And preached what others only dared to think. . . . ¹

Jonathan Mayhew had died almost thirty years earlier. The boy poet learned of the pastor from his father, Robert Treat Paine, a Massachusetts attorney and signer of the Declaration of Independence, who had attended services frequently at Mayhew’s Boston church. This insightful verse laid open the essence of Mayhew’s personal character. From youth to premature death, he rejected any tradition or authority that contradicted his own judgment and preached openly heterodox doctrines that some New England ministers, like his friends Charles Chauncy and Ebenezer Gay, “only dared to think.”²

Mayhew’s upbringing and education fueled his confidence in the efficacy of his own mind—and of human reason as such. His father, the widely admired missionary Experience Mayhew, was a teacher of Arminian theology who believed that “God dealeth with men as with reasonable creatures.” At Harvard College in the 1740s, missionary’s son studied the “natural religion” of the British Enlightenment, including the Arminian theology of John Tillotson and the anti-Trinitarian theology of Samuel Clarke. In his first book, Seven Sermons, Mayhew declared his independence from the orthodox Calvinism of his fellow Boston clergymen (rejecting Trinitarian Christianity soon after). Seven Sermons propounded the basic premises of eighteenth-century natural religion.

According to Mayhew, God is rational and benevolent, desiring the happiness of his mortal creatures. God created man with natural faculties—among them, a rational faculty and an innate “moral sense”—suited to the identification, pursuit, and attainment of happiness. Because God created all humans with the capacity for rational deliberation and moral agency, every individual has both the duty and the right to think rationally and live virtuously. By practicing the classical moral virtues out of a sincere love for God and man, humans are justified before God and can attain happiness on earth and in heaven. Anyone who imposes his own moral and religious judgments on another person violates the natural right of private judgment and therefore God’s will for mankind. Understood in this heterodox Protestant framework, the right of private judgment ultimately had radical political implications, leading Mayhew to such “Real Whig” principles as individual natural rights, popular sovereignty, consensual government, and the people’s right of resistance to tyranny. Sacralizing reason, worldly happiness, and moral virtue, the natural religion of Seven Sermons provided the vision of human nature and moral right on which Mayhew erected an individualistic conception of liberty and an equalitarian conception of civil government.

On October 8, 1720, Jonathan Mayhew was born to solidly Puritan parents with the solidly Puritan names of Experience and Remember Mayhew. Rev. Experience Mayhew was a poorly educated minister who lived in genteel poverty on Martha’s Vineyard, an isolated island off the coast of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, sparsely populated by Wampanoag Indians and a few Englishmen. For sixty-five years, Experience labored with quiet devotion as missionary to the natives, as his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had done before him. Despite his lack of formal learning, Rev. Mayhew published in 1709 a translation of the Psalms and the Gospel of John in the Indians’ native tongue. His mission work won him the admiration and support of such Puritan luminaries as Judge Samuel Sewall and Rev. Cotton Mather, who said of Mayhew, “in the Evangelical Service among the Indians, there is no man that exceeds this Mr. Mayhew, if there by any that equals him.” The Praying Indians of Martha’s Vineyard provided a rare example of success in the mission of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans to convert the indigenous population to English Protestant Christianity.³

The theology of John Calvin provided New England Puritanism with its hard core, and potential Indian converts were often baffled by the Calvinist tenets that human nature is totally depraved by original sin, God’s will predestines most humans to damnation, and one can do nothing to earn salvation or even know for certain if one is counted among those souls divinely elected for salvation. Catholic missionaries in Canada and the Great Lakes had greater success with Indian conversion, teaching that Christians can access God’s saving grace through faith combined with good works, such as participation in the sacraments of baptism and communion. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, William Ames and other English Protestant theologians softened Calvinism by wrapping it in covenant theology, the doctrine that God’s will is sovereign and he saves whomever he pleases, but he pleases to limit his own will by entering into a contract with mankind, offering humans the terms of salvation: faith as well as obedience to his revealed laws. Flourishing among the Massachusetts Bay Puritans, covenant theology struck a balance between divine power and human responsibility. By the early eighteenth century, this delicate balance tipped increasingly toward an emphasis on human responsibility, thanks to introduction of the “natural religion” of the British Enlightenment, which held that God’s perfect rationality and benevolence limited his will and power and left room for humans to please God through their own rationality and benevolence. In his struggle to win Wampanoag souls for Protestantism, Experience Mayhew drifted unawares into the forbidden waters of rationalist heterodoxy.⁴

On November 23, 1718, Rev. Mayhew gave a sermon in Boston entitled A Discourse Shewing That God Dealeth with Men as with Reasonable Creatures. In the familiar idiom of Puritan covenant theology, he took as given that God’s covenants provide mankind with moral laws. The theme of his sermon was that, “while GOD does thus deal with Men in a Covenant-way, He Dealeth with them as with Rational Beings.” Because God has “made Man a Creature capable of thinking” and imbued him with “such noble and excellent Powers” as “Reason and Understanding,” Mayhew observed, men and women are “capable of the highest Views, and the most Excellent Employments and Enjoyments.” In stressing God’s rationality and his intent that man also live by the guidance of reason, the missionary tread dangerously close to the thin line separating Puritan covenant theology from Enlightenment natural religion.⁵

In emphasizing the rationality, justice, and benevolence of God, Experience Mayhew inadvertently crossed that line. “As GOD made us Rational Creatures,” he instructed his Boston audience, “so He condescends to Reason and Argue with us, about things that are of the greatest importance and concernment to us; He is willing that Reason should decide every case wherein He has to do with us; And if there be any matters of Controversy betwixt Him and us, He invites us to argue with Him upon them.” God takes pains to reveal the reasons behind his judgments, so that not even the damned can fairly claim his decrees to be “merely Arbitrary, without respect to Reason and Justice.” John Calvin and the English covenant theologians claimed that there is no justice above God’s sovereign will. Mayhew taught on the contrary that, while “GOD’s Justice and Sovereignty are distinguishable one from the other, so it is not to be supposed that GOD ever so exerciseth His Sovereign Power as to act any ways contrary to Justice or Equity.” It was not simply that God chose not to act in an arbitrary or mysterious fashion, but that God “neither does nor can act any thing contrary to His Infinite Wisdom, and Unalterable Truth.” Rev. Mayhew insisted that “there are some things that are in their own Nature unjust, and therefore such as GOD neither can nor will do.”⁶

This contention—that there is a natural truth and natural justice to which even God is subject—was a radical departure from orthodox Calvinism. By assuming that promise-keeping is a moral virtue that God would not violate, covenant theology brought Mayhew to the rationalist conclusion that there is a natural moral order, existing independent of God’s will, that God could not violate without acting against his own perfection. Despite its heterodoxy, the missionary’s sermon was published without controversy in Boston in 1720, and Harvard College rewarded the humble Indian preacher with an honorary degree. That same year, his son Jonathan was born.

Remember Mayhew died two years later from complications in childbirth; Experience never remarried. Like the Puritan Jehovah, his presence pervaded his son’s life on Martha’s Vineyard inescapably. Like the benevolent deity of the British Enlightenment, however, Experience treated his children as reasonable creatures, preferring persuasion to the rod. Jonathan loved and deeply respected his father. In 1764, five years after Experience’s death, the younger Mayhew wrote of “the irreproachable memory of my father,” whom he honored as “a good man, who spent a long life in the laborious and his patrimony in the humble and laborious, tho’ apostolical employment of preaching ‘the unsearchable riches of Christ’ to poor Indians.” Experience hoped his eldest son, Nathan, would carry on the family tradition of ministering to the Vineyard Indians. Having long called for an educated ministry in the Indian missions, he sent Nathan to Harvard College on scholarship, but the young man died only two years after his graduation. Experience’s second son, Zachariah, eventually took up his father’s mission work, but he was not well suited for higher education. Jonathan, the youngest son, displayed a dazzling intelligence and a special talent for classical languages. Greek and Latin were the principal subjects of the college entrance examinations. Despite his apparent lack of formal preparation, Jonathan passed his exams in July 1740 and secured a scholarship, beginning his education at Harvard that August at the age of nineteen, much later than most boys.⁷

Young Jonathan’s belief in the power of natural reason, following from his upbringing by Rev. Mayhew on Martha’s Vineyard, was affirmed by his program of study at Harvard. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, New England’s foremost college came under the leadership of moderate Calvinist Congregationalists who softened the hard edge of Puritan orthodoxy with gentility of manners and a “catholic” spirit of tolerance. Among these moderate Calvinists were college presidents John Leverett and Edward Holyoke, pastors William Brattle and Nathaniel Appleton, and the long-serving Hollis Professor of Divinity, Edward Wigglesworth. In recommending Holyoke for the college presidency in 1737, Rev. John Barnard told the Massachusetts governor, “I think Mr. Holyoke as orthodox a Calvinist as any man; though I look upon him too much of a gentleman, and of too catholic a temper, to cram his principles down another man’s throat.” One could not better convey the liberal spirit of New England’s moderate Calvinists.⁸

Their moderation lay not in dilution of Calvinist doctrine but in willingness to let students exercise free inquiry in the pursuit of religious truth, confident that reason would lead them back to the faith of their Puritan fathers. Assigned reading immersed students in natural theology—the systematic inference of God’s existence and attributes from the “design” of the natural world—and natural religion, the systematic deduction of moral law from man’s divinely created nature. By the 1720s, one could find on the Harvard College library’s shelves the works of Archbishop John Tillotson and Dr. Samuel Clarke, two Episcopalian champions of natural religion considered dangerously heterodox by orthodox Calvinists. While John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding did not find its way into the Harvard curriculum until 1743, college tutor John Whiting taught its philosophic principles and methods of thinking as early as the 1710s. Dr. John Winthrop, first Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, introduced New England’s elite youth to the inductive reasoning and naturalistic worldview of Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Edmund Halley. As sound Protestants themselves, though, the students were less interested in science for what it said about nature than for what it implied about God’s nature. Thanks to these liberalizing reforms, the germ of an American Enlightenment—simultaneously religious and rational—grew quietly but steadily in Harvard Yard over the course of the eighteenth century.⁹

The British Enlightenment’s infiltration of the New England mind spurred orthodox Calvinists like Rev. Jonathan Edwards to put the old doctrines into new bottles and warm them with an evangelical appeal to emotion. Within a month of departing the sleepy isolation of Martha’s Vineyard, Jonathan Mayhew found himself caught up in the First Great Awakening. Religious revival struck Boston in 1740 with the sudden violence of a northeaster. On September 16, a cross-eyed evangelist from England named George Whitefield brought the good news of God’s mercy to Boston’s anxious sinners. He preached nineteen times in eleven days, appea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Right of Private Judgment
• 2 The Right of Resistance
• 3 Virtue and Liberty
• 4 Power and Corruption
• 5 Sceptre and Surplice
• 6 The Whig Dilemma
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back cover