Sarah A. Morgan Smith is a scholar of American political thought and religion, whose work focuses on making connections between past and present in a way that promotes human flourishing in the future. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University, where her teaching focuses on the role of theology in forming and sustaining civic commitments. She is the cofounder and director of a homeschool learning community in Carmel, Indiana, where she serves as a “guide, philosopher, and friend” for children who are engaged in the work of their own educations.
Papists, Pacifists and Puritans: The 17th Century Religious Origins of American Independence
In 1750, Jonathan Mayhew preached a sermon commemorating the anniversary of the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War. Years later, John Adams credited Mayhew’s Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission with helping to “revive” the popular “animosities against tyranny, in church and state” that were central to the revolutionary cause. This talk is an attempt to better understand how Mayhew’s defense of a century-old regicide took on such significance for the American independence movement. By looking to Mayhew, we can understand that American Independence was not simply a footnote to Locke and had a deep basis in Protestantism. By considering the political dimensions to the conflict between episcopacy (represented by both Catholicism and the Church of England establishment) and the more congregational structures favored by religious dissenters, such as Quakers and Puritans during the seventeenth century, we can better understand the explosive reaction of American colonists to shifts in British colonial policy during the eighteenth century.
A Friend to the Revolution: Mercy Otis Warren and the Ordinary Virtues of Republicanism
Although Americans are more apt to remember their revolutionary “fathers,” Mercy Otis Warren’s work as propagandist and political commentator in the cause of American independence gives her a strong claim to the title of “founding mother.” Warren wrote prolifically on the most important issues of her time, penning satirical plays criticizing the royal governor in Massachusetts, as well as poems on subjects ranging from the Boston Tea Party to the arc of imperial politics. Her political writings are largely focused on the conflict between virtue and vice, viewing tyranny as the inevitable result of public corruption and liberty as the rightful inheritance of the just. Her efforts in support of the American Revolution and later the Republic were meant to suppress the vices of luxury and corruption associated with men of light substance and little dignity. These values shine forth in her personal letters and in her more propagandistic writings. In an age of widespread public discord and distrust, perhaps we ought to revisit both of them with eyes to see what lasting lessons remain there to be learned.
Reading the Constitution in Light of the Declaration: The Originalism of Justice Joseph Story
Born in Marblehead, Massachusetts to a member of the Sons of Liberty, Joseph Story (1779–1845) was steeped in the republican rhetoric of the American Revolution from birth and moved from youth to young adulthood as did the nation. As a lawyer and a judge, Story became a nationally known authority on the Constitution, articulating an interpretative approach rooted firmly in the principles of the American Revolution as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. It is clear Story not only believed there was a “right” way to read the Constitution of the United States, but that he presumed the inculcation of the proper understanding of American constitutionalism to be necessary to the survival of the Union because of the potential for instability inherent in the doctrines of the sovereignty of the people and the attendant rights of revolution and resistance. I argue that Story believed the Constitution contained within itself the keys to an interpretative approach true to the original intentions of the American people in their capacities as revolutionaries that was nevertheless compatible with the (self-imposed) limitations necessary for republican citizenship. Story offered the Constitutional text back to the people as the embodiment of their best political wisdom, and thus, as a legitimate restraint upon their sovereign power.
Choosing Righteousness as a Path to “The Pursuit of Happiness”: Advice to Citizens in the Newly Independent States
Much ink has been spilled over the question of what is meant by “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, and yet, this phrase does not appear to have been especially controversial at the time. Two years earlier, in 1774, American patriot John Dickinson claimed in the Essay on the Constitutional Power of Great Britain (1774) that “the happiness of the people is the end, and … the body of the constitution. Freedom is the spirit or soul.” Yet neither happiness nor freedom can be without bounds, for it is not logical for a republic to predicate its existence on a commitment so individualistic that its realization perforce sets its citizens at odds with one another. Happiness, as understood in the American founding, then, must be a reference to something more than merely circumstantial, something existential. In that sense only would the right to “the pursuit of happiness” be understood as something with the potential to unite, rather than to divide, the people of this new nation. Drawing on Dickinson, Adams, and other contemporary writers, I argue that “happiness” as understood in the Declaration must be in a certain measure both absolute and transcendent. Absolute, insofar as genuine happiness was understood to depend upon virtue, and transcendent in that it appeared conceivable, in the minds of the founders, for a people to be both in the midst of an armed conflict and happy, as long as their character and principles were just.
