State Constitutions and Their Contradictions

Nearly all of the state constitutions—some of them drafted by representatives in provincial congresses and others (including the one for Massachusetts) by a specially called constitutional convention—affirm the inviolability of religious freedom or freedom of conscience and reject legal compulsion of religious belief.Footnote ⁵ Many do so in the Declaration of Rights (sometimes denoted as preambles) that enumerate the rights of state citizens. Ratified in 1780, the constitution of Massachusetts declared that “no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience.” It also decreed that “no subordination of any one sect or denomination to another, shall ever be established by law.”Footnote ⁶

Other states went further, asserting freedom of conscience and prohibiting establishment of any one church or denomination. New York “abrogated and rejected” any aspect of the English common law or the colony’s law that “may be construed to establish or maintain any particular denomination.” It also excoriated “spiritual oppression and intolerance, wherewith the bigotry and ambition of weak and wicked priests and princes have scourged mankind,” and declared that “the free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination … shall forever be allowed within this state, to all mankind.”Footnote ⁷ Pennsylvania’s “Declaration of Rights” drew on the language of moral liberty to claim that “no man ought … be compelled to attend any religious worship … against his own free will and consent” because all men had “the right of conscience in the free exercise of religious worship.”Footnote ⁸ The constitutions of Delaware, North Carolina, and South Carolina included similar clauses.

The basic structure and offices of state government (often called the “Frame of Government”) in those same constitutions, however, included a Protestant establishment. Without mention of any specific denomination, the constitutions contained rules about taxes and requirements for holding public office that reinforced Protestant hegemony. The 1778 South Carolina constitution (the second version of the state’s constitution) was the most explicit, declaring that “the Christian [sic] Protestant shall be deemed and hereby constituted and declared to be the established religion of this state.” It set out the theological terms for a religious society, church, or denomination to claim legal recognition “as part of this establishment.” They had to teach the existence of God and eternal rewards and punishments, the necessity of public worship, that “the christian [sic] religion is the true religion,” that the Bible was “the rule of faith and practice,” and that every citizen should “bear witness” to such truths when called on by governing authorities. It also decreed that no clergyman “shall be recognized” who was not chosen by “a majority” of the congregation or who failed to study the Bible and instruct his people in the requirements for “eternal salvation” as “proved from the scripture.”Footnote ⁹

Virginia also reflected the establishment position, even with its Declaration of Rights as a companion to its constitution.Footnote ¹⁰ Its constitution before 1786 made no mention of matters of establishment, which left in place many provisions for state support of the Anglican Church. Anglican vestries maintained their prerogative to approve and record all marriages in Virginia and dispense public poor relief. Anglican clergy retained their power to ban dissenting preachers from their parish boundaries. The House of Delegates, dominated by Anglicans, continued to regulate church property and disputes over the church’s liturgy. Baptists and Presbyterians in Virginia complained that such provisions violated the principle of religious freedom that defined republican notions of liberty. Their petitions to the House of Delegates resulted in an end to state taxes for the support of the Anglican Church, but otherwise failed to disestablish the old order.Footnote ¹¹

Article III of the Massachusetts Constitution provided an extended rationale for a religious establishment and, in the process, displayed the Protestant assumptions of its authors.Footnote ¹² The “good order and preservation of civil society”—a concern made urgent by wartime conditions—required “the public worship of God” and the inculcation of “piety, religion, and morality.” The people of the state accordingly had a “right to invest their legislature with power” to authorize towns to raise funds for “public protestant teachers” and require “an attendance upon” some form of religious worship. Pennsylvania confirmed that its religious institutions would maintain their “privileges, immunities and estates,” and enjoy public support, because they encouraged the “virtue” requisite for a well-ordered commonwealth. Nearly all the constitutions, save New York’s, affirmed the importance of religion to the state and blended the understanding of “religion” with some form of Protestantism.Footnote ¹³

The clearest indication that the revolutionary states affirmed religious liberty yet endorsed a Protestant establishment appeared in the qualifications for public office, particularly in the oaths administered to governors, senators, representatives, or magistrates. Massachusetts and Maryland prohibited all non-Christians from elected office. Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, North Carolina, and South Carolina required a confession of Protestant belief. Pennsylvania and North Carolina included an attestation to the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments, and, like South Carolina, an assent to the doctrine of eternal rewards and punishments. Delaware required officials to confess their belief in each of the three members of the Trinity and the veracity of the Bible.Footnote ¹⁴

The authors of state constitutions, that is, concluded that “moral liberty,” which they heralded as a natural right, was congruent with some form of an Anglo-American, White Protestant establishment. They accepted the exclusion of non-Protestant Europeans, non-Christian Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans from that establishment and its benefits, including the prerogative to hold public office.Footnote ¹⁵ What was it about moral liberty that legitimated, complemented, or at least allowed the framers of state constitutions to support a Protestant political order on such terms? What explains their insistence on the principle of religious liberty even as they constructed a political order with conditions that excluded non-Protestants?

According to one line of historical interpretation, this apparent contradiction was an English inheritance. Supporters of the constitutional monarchy established in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688—so-called Whigs or republicans—had long claimed that toleration for religious dissent, codified in the Toleration Act of 1689, was compatible with an established Church of England. The English constitution, they argued, allowed individuals the liberty to believe according to their moral conscience, in contrast to what they described as Roman Catholic tyranny. At the same time, the kingdom’s liberty—a collective notion of liberty—was closely tied to a Protestant identity. Seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century republicans argued that because the people of England had embraced Protestantism, they had the liberty of living in a Protestant kingdom that required public officials to support the Church of England.Footnote ¹⁶ In other words, there were two versions of religious liberty: one for individual subjects in their private lives and another for the government and its officials, who represented the Protestant ethos of England’s people.

Early modern historians such as Alexandra Walsham and Ethan Shagan have stressed this state-oriented configuration of liberty. They are critics of the so-called whiggish narrative, according to which John Locke and his admirers in America’s revolutionary generation initiated a modern, liberal practice of religious toleration. In contrast, they argue that constitutional advocates in England barred Roman Catholics from the throne and protected mainstream Protestant churches that supported the monarchy. The discourse of moderation or toleration, they suggest, legitimated officials who privileged long-standing Protestant notions of true religion: theological beliefs that were sincerely held by individuals whose choice to believe was made without coercion. They thereby excluded groups that held different—communal and ritualistic, for example—ideas of religion. In England, cycles of persecution, ambivalence, and pragmatic accommodation were justified as ensuring the kingdom’s well-being.Footnote ¹⁷

The ambiguities of religious liberty during the Revolution were part of this larger dynamic. Americans accepted many of the social and political conventions of the home country even as they advocated for independence, as historians Jack Greene and J. R. Pole have maintained. The authors of American state constitutions assumed that Protestantism was integral to the social order, just as they never questioned the hierarchies and economic inequalities that mirrored the social order in England. Greene argues that the Revolution was a republican assertion of local rights over and against the monarchy and colonial governors, rather than a rejection of the social patterns that marked colonial life. The Revolution was dedicated to sustaining those patterns: to securing the positions of local elites, with their economic and religious privileges.Footnote ¹⁸

Pole contends that the authors of state constitutions drew from four sources: British statutes as they applied to the colonies, common law, statutes enacted by colonial governments, and precedents from colonial courts. They adopted these laws “in defense of traditional rights” against the British Empire. They privileged court decisions that enhanced rights, including religious liberty, that applied to individuals. Yet they did not contemplate a revision of the role of Protestantism in political life, except for their rejection of the English claim that the Church of England was the only church established by law. They invoked freedom of conscience to sustain rather than disqualify Protestant hegemony in America.Footnote ¹⁹

Such accounts describe the establishment provisions of state constitutions, but do not tell us why Americans accepted the English pattern of religious liberty after the Revolution. What underlay their willingness to adopt an English pattern in religious affairs even as they rejected other aspects of English political tradition, including imperial agendas? An older historiography posited a stark distinction between moral theory and political reality. The theories of religious liberty announced in the preambles or declarations of rights—full of the language of natural rights and moral conscience—amounted to either theoretical abstractions detached from the practice of running of states or mere “pretensions,” brandished to legitimate coercive religious regimes.Footnote ²⁰

More recently, political historians have detected in the state constitutions a bundle of different ideas about religion and the state, tied together as a work of political compromise. Willi Paul Adams argued that they reflected a pragmatic alliance between natural rights ideologies, with their focus on individuals’ liberties, and conservative forms of republicanism that emphasized communal virtues. Adams gave little attention to matters of religious liberty or establishment and suggested that the authors of the constitutions were less eager to come to a coherent consensus on religion than they were to enhance national solidarity by appealing to a wide range of sentiments. Thomas Curry argued that contradictions in the state constitutions reflected an accommodation to different religious groups: dissenters who were guaranteed rights of conscience, established churches that benefitted from state support, and public leaders who desired widespread religiosity as a bulwark against atheism or forms of immorality that would jeopardize the American cause. The components of the constitutions reflected concessions to different interest groups—deal-making. An allowance for Massachusetts residents to designate their tax contributions for a non-Congregationalist Protestant pastor, for example, evidenced such concessions and marked the Massachusetts “establishment” as more limited than it had been in colonial times. The cultural historian David Sehat confirms this conclusion by arguing that tensions within each of the constitutions—with special attention to Pennsylvania—resulted from attempts to accommodate groups that had different strategies to promote a Protestant society, even if the principles of Protestantism validated freedom of conscience for individuals in their private lives.Footnote ²¹

Specialists in the history of religious freedom in Virginia have refined this argument, with greater attention to debates among Protestant factions: Anglicans who supported establishment, Presbyterians and Baptists who advocated disestablishment but wanted state support for Protestant teaching, Methodists and other evangelicals (including many Baptists) who resisted any state incursions on religious matters, and religious rationalists such as Jefferson who joined evangelicals, albeit for reasons of natural rights rather than church purity. Thomas E. Buckley focused this line of thought on disputes over clerical privileges, while John Ragosta and Debra Neill have fastened on Anglican leaders who made concessions to dissenters in order to mobilize participation in the Revolution. According to Buckley and Ragosta, piecemeal compromises among competing Protestant factions reflected a gradual move toward liberty as a political necessity.Footnote ²²

Such arguments about the English inheritance of religious establishment, the preservation of social hierarchy, or compromise for the sake of national unity, participation in the military, and moral resolve explain much of the social background and effects of the discourse of moral liberty. They do not, however, account for the meaning of this discourse as early Americans deployed it: how they understood moral liberty to be compatible with a Protestant political order rather than a mere concession to power or national necessity. Their conception of religious liberty did not preclude their assent to a Protestant establishment. Revolutionary-era Americans conceived of liberty in ways that implied republican principles, including revolution against the British Empire, and fostered a Protestant ordering of social and political life—all without deliberate prevarication, self-contradiction, or compromise. Moral liberty provides important clues.

Conversion and Moral Liberty

Mid-eighteenth-century debates about religious conversion shaped common ideas about moral liberty. From the 1720s through the 1750s, religious controversies in New England, especially attending the revivals that culminated in the Great Awakening, brought philosophical and theological debates about conversion to popular culture. The nature of religious choice that defined conversion and the capacity to make such decisions became central to the understanding of freedom of conscience. As the Boston preacher Jonathan Mayhew put it, the “choice of our religion,” be it “Trinitarian,” “Unitarian,” “Papist,” “Protestant,” “Mahometan,” or “Heathen,” was a matter of individual responsibility or agency. Reason “obliged” every person to “think and judge” for themselves about the “truth and falsehood,” and the prospect for “happiness” offered by different religious communities. Like his contemporaries, Mayhew used a jumble of verbs to convey the willfulness of these choices, such as “embrace,” “assent,” and “yield.”Footnote ²³

Their emphasis on conversion prompted New England’s Protestants to reconsider what had long been an essential tenet of Puritanism (and other Reformed traditions): that individuals’ choices counted for less in the process of salvation than did supernatural grace, or the effects of predestination. The revivals and renewed attention to evangelistic missions to Indigenous Americans compelled Protestants to balance a traditional Calvinist emphasis on divine sovereignty with the language of moral volition. To promote the conversions so needed in New England, Mayhew contended in 1755, “the perplexing question concerning human liberty” had to be answered “by those, who can fully reconcile our freedom” with “God’s fore-knowledge, and eternal counsels.” It was no longer possible to “answer the difficulty, by denying human freedom” on one side, or “providence” on the other. A consensus among most Protestants emerged by the late 1750s: religious conversions were validated by the moral freedom of the individual.Footnote ²⁴

Mayhew spoke for the rationalist wing of Boston’s clergy as well as other Protestants in New England. Even self-styled Calvinists began to fashion what they maintained was a morally reasonable form of Reformed teaching. In his 1753 treatise on Freedom of the Will, Jonathan Edwards conceded that the issue of the day was not a choice between moral freedom and supernatural grace. Rather, the proper path would incorporate these two tenets in a true theory of conversion.

Edwards deployed definitions of the key terms widely used by moral and political commentators in the Revolutionary period. He argued that the human will, or volition, was free to make its choices according to its tastes and perceptions of what was good or bad, attractive or repulsive. He also contended that those tastes or perceptions were beyond our control—hence his argument for a divine source of faith.Footnote ²⁵ Yet, Edwards insisted, there was nothing in that description of the will that contradicted common notions of freedom, the mandate to promote conversion, or, for that matter, a republican-whiggish insistence on voluntary participation in the political order. As Edwards claimed, most people spoke of free will in just such terms: to will something was to have the capacity to choose. No one thought that our choices were unaffected by unbidden precedents: that choice meant a disconnection with “habitual bias,” “the stronger motive,” or other such terms for moral tastes or external forces over which a person had no control. Edwards here fully endorsed the moral competence and freedom of all people.Footnote ²⁶ “All that men do in religion,” he wrote, “is their own act” or “an exertion of their own power” according to “the ordinary use of language.” However, one came by one’s will, he concluded, “man is fully and perfectly free, according to the primary and common notion of freedom.”Footnote ²⁷ As Edwards put it to his Scottish correspondent John Erskine, he wanted to demonstrate that the “freedom of moral agents” was integral to conversion and to political ideas of moral liberty, especially to ideas of consent that shaped people into “proper subjects.”Footnote ²⁸

Edwards’s protégé, Joseph Bellamy, taught dozens of ministers that the very meaning of being a “Moral Agent” implied freedom from coercion. That being the case, preachers were to make “consistent” the axioms of evangelical theology, moral freedom and responsibility, and “Liberty and Moral Government.” Ezra Stiles, a Newport pastor and later President of Yale, told a clerical convention in 1760 that old disputes between proponents of “calvinism and Arminianism [sic]”—those who stressed divine predestination and those who stressed human decision—were now a dying echo. All New England ministers, he hoped, affirmed both divine grace and “the moral liberty and free agency of man” as essentials.Footnote ²⁹

Liberty—the word freedom was used as a cognate—had legal ramifications. They ranged from the security of commercial ventures and property to fair judicial decisions and legal proceedings, and the enforcement of contracts.Footnote ³⁰ Those legal implications reinforced liberty’s importance. It was associated with republican politics in Britain, with the Whig monarchy revered by New Englanders, with Britain’s prosperity, and with the cause of dissenters such as Puritans in their struggle against the Anglican establishment in England.Footnote ³¹ The very notion of conversion as a willful choice implied that religious liberty, or freedom of conscience, ought to be upheld as integral to religious life itself. No good Protestant wanted to appear to deny that religious liberty was an essential part of English law, properly understood.

Moral Liberty and Independence

Such conceptions of moral liberty underscored the conviction that inherited loyalties and external political forces did not prevent people from making choices about their social allegiances, including their relationship to the British crown and government.Footnote ³² We can sample such political implications with some attention to patriot preachers such as Samuel West, the pastor in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Like the political firebrand Jonathan Mayhew, West—son of a missionary to Algonquian peoples in New England—promoted the idea of religious conversion and the philosophical assumption of free will. West also became an army chaplain in 1776, predicted an American victory, was hounded by the British, and joined the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1779.Footnote ³³

West grounded his case for independence on contemporary philosophies of moral choice. Preaching on the occasion of the election of the Massachusetts Council in May 1776—after major military hostilities had begun—he argued that Americans were morally free, despite the exercise of British force, to form “themselves into a body politic, and assume the powers of legislation.” That is, they could base their laws, as they had based their religious principles, on the determination of their moral consciences. Using the language of the Scottish moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, West maintained that every person had “moral powers and faculties, by which we are enabled to discern the difference between right and wrong.” In particular, people had “tender and social affections, with generous and benevolent principles.” Common people’s social sensibilities gave them the capacity to determine which form of government, or which leaders, best promoted the commonweal.Footnote ³⁴

West and other preachers often blurred the precise formulations of philosophers: Locke, say, on the power of self-determination or Hutcheson on the moral sense. They blended moral philosophy with republican theory, religious dissent, and constitutional argument, all in support of liberty.Footnote ³⁵ West linked the “perfect freedom” of people “to order all their actions … as they think fit … without asking leave or depending on the will of any man” to political matters. He defined “right judgment,” reasonableness, true discernment, and proper affections as having a regard for the common good and “natural rights” of others. To be sure, West maintained, people often judged wrongly or made selfish and irrational choices. Yet they still had the capacity to know, sense, and select the good, whatever their political situation. West then made quick work of contending that Americans were free to choose independence as a means to secure their collective happiness.Footnote ³⁶

Conflating religious choice, moral volition, and political self-determination, West and his contemporaries affirmed a mélange of constitutional, religious, and political meanings of freedom and liberty. Spiritual and civil concepts of liberty overlapped explicitly in frequent protests by non-Anglican ministers against Anglican missionary societies and proposals for a bishopric in America during the 1760s. The authority claimed by Church of England bishops, critics charged, violated the liberty of conscience that was essential to conversion and to a legitimate constitutional order.Footnote ³⁷

Moral freedom challenged many aspects of imperial policy. When Presbyterian minister John Joachim Zubly protested attempts by Georgia governors to void the 1771 and 1772 election results for Speaker of the Commons House, he invoked the foundational principles of moral liberty. “To talk of” an election as a free choice, “which yet may be controuled and annulled by another, seems inconsistent with the very nature of choice.” The governor had violated the “liberty” of the House. Parsing a favorite text of patriots, Galatians 5:1, the Calvinist pastor Judah Champion of Litchfield fired rebellion by linking “civil and sacred liberty” into “the grand whole” of “moral freedom.” In his remonstrations against the 1764 Sugar Act, the Rhode Island lawyer, sometimes governor, chief justice, and signer of the Declaration, Stephen Hopkins insisted that the contest with Parliament demanded an affirmation that “liberty solely consists in an independency upon the will of another.”Footnote ³⁸

Moral liberty gave preachers a language to justify a break from past associations and embrace new loyalties. Preachers described moral liberty especially in terms of disaffiliation from existing social allegiances and affiliation with new ones. Such decisions, they claimed, rested on scrutiny of one’s current moral condition and a sense of dissatisfaction or unease with one’s situation.

Samuel Langdon’s 1775 sermon for the election of Massachusetts representatives to the Continental Congress serves as a case in point.Footnote ³⁹ Graduated from Harvard in 1740, Langdon served as a chaplain in the New Hampshire militia and pastor in Portsmouth. He was instrumental in the founding of Dartmouth College, the mission of which centered on the conversion of Native peoples. As the Secretary of the Sons of Liberty in Portsmouth after 1764, he supported resistance to Parliament, Courts of Admiralty, proposals for the appointment of an Anglican bishop in America, and decrees of toleration for the Catholic Church in Quebec (the Quebec Act). He lobbied New Hampshire representatives to oppose the Townshend Acts. Appointed President of Harvard in 1774, he served as chaplain to the Continental Army in Cambridge at the request of the Committee of Safety.Footnote ⁴⁰

In his 1775 sermon, Langdon urged delegates from Massachusetts to declare openly that they had changed their loyalties from British king to American Congress. Grounding his appeal on moral liberty, he described the American position. Taxation, trade restrictions, blockades, confiscation of American arms, admiralty courts, and the occupation of Boston all amounted to an assault on “Liberty,” Langdon concluded.Footnote ⁴¹

Langdon asked them to summon the conviction of sin that initiated religious awakening as a prelude to conversion: the realization of one’s bondage to evil, depraved affections, and self-delusions. Just as converts came to know that they had falsely relied on their churchgoing and being dutiful children of saints for their salvation, so American patriots had come to see that they had been “deluded with a meer [sic]phantom of liberty” under “the British nation.” Their government in England had “degenerated” under “an absolute monarch” who subjected them to “shameful abuse.” To “defend America from slavery,” they must disown their current rulers. This change of loyalty included a confession of Americans’ own “corruptions,” especially the “bribery” and personal ambition that dominated colonial governments.Footnote ⁴²

This sense of sin provoked a revulsion against one’s own spiritual state and political condition. Langdon implored delegates to Congress to refuse further negotiation with London or comply with British demands to surrender their arms. British rule “should be discarded.” Langdon stressed that religious conversion involved a renunciation of idols, which misled and enslaved, like the gods of Babylon. Americans similarly could now detect the true colors of Britain: “the enemy” that “made a mock” of genuine religion, their “mouths … full of horrid blasphemies,” and “malice and barbarity.”Footnote ⁴³

The depth of imperial malfeasance, Landgon continued, compelled Americans to face the choice between “submission to the despotic power” of Parliament and fidelity to the Continental Congress. The newly formed American body clearly had the better case: it had begun to put “into execution the spirited resolutions of a people too sensible” and reasonable “to deliver themselves up to oppression and slavery.” It was “rational and necessary,” then, for Americans to confide in their representatives. Like a congregation favored by a convert, Congress had the “wisdom, religion, and public spirit” to “determine what may be done” to establish a “government” of “law and justice.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Other preachers attacked counterarguments from London, from British evangelicals such as John Wesley, and from some American loyalists, that colonists were subjects of a King who had inherited his authority as a divine appointment. Conversion, according to critics of loyalism, began with a recognition that inherited identities—such as being the children of church members—often misled and could mask damnable hypocrisy. According to Boston’s Mayhew, there was a clear analog to notions of inherited political identity. The two cases were “exactly parallel,” and it was his job to expose the “fabulous and chimerical” nature of divine right.Footnote ⁴⁵

These arguments appeared time and again in revolutionary tracts. John Cleaveland, a separatist evangelical from Ipswich, argued in 1771 newspaper editorials that political loyalties were no more fixed by geographical and familial origins than religious faith. “Our civil Subjection to his Britannic Majesty and State is voluntary” and does not “arise,” as he put it, from “Residence in a State” or “Birth.” Jonathan Edwards, Jr., the Calvinist pastor of New Haven, focused on the priority of freedom of conscience and moral judgment over inherited identities. “We are no longer Englishmen,” he announced in 1774. The very name obscured the truth: Americans were “as [much] slaves as the inhabitants of Turkey or the subjects of the Great Mogul,” “threatened” with “poverty” and “desolation” by the “arbitrary will of our masters.” They were free to resist their enslavers.Footnote ⁴⁶

The self-scrutiny grounded in moral freedom and central to conversion partly explains how the rhetoric of the 1770s became so charged. Eighteenth-century critics argued that rulers in London were not merely incompetent or financially strapped, but malevolent.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even decisions from London that once might have provoked a riot at most and shrug of the shoulders at least—such as a tax on tea, arrest of smugglers, quartering of soldiers, or consideration of a Church of England bishop—now provoked charges of perfidy, enmity, and evil. The language of sin, integral to Protestant conversion and the moral choices that went with it, raised political resistance to the level of revolution. Protestant preachers and lay observers recognized that the choice of one’s religion was not the same as the choice of one’s government or nation. They nonetheless drew corollaries between liberty in these different realms, using the same reasoning about social affiliation.

The language of freedom resonated in religious and political decisions among common laypeople as well as elite politicians and lawyers. The story of Sarah Osborn serves to illustrate. A Newport, Rhode Island schoolteacher and widow, she underwent conversion in 1737, after which she devoted herself to spiritual reflection and to the local Congregational church. Influenced by her pastors in Newport—David Rowland and Samuel Hopkins—and exposed to the preaching of Stephen Johnson in nearby Lyme, Connecticut, Osborn took a familiar path to political revolution.Footnote ⁴⁸

During the decade following the 1765 Stamp Act, Osborn increasingly embraced political activism. She imbibed local newspaper invectives against the Intolerable Acts and other parliamentary misdeeds. She joined Newport’s cadre of spinners who, following Hopkins’s instruction, boycotted British goods. She defiantly refused to leave Newport during British bombardment and occupation. She also predicted America’s “redemption” from imperial “captivity.”Footnote ⁴⁹

For Osborn and her contemporaries, such decisions were hardly inevitable. They had long identified themselves as bound by their English identity, inheritors of English social mores, laws, and religion. The “present crisis,” wrote Osborn’s neighboring pastor in newspaper editorials, was “perplexing and exercising” because it demanded an assertion of moral will—a freedom to resist, in this case—against formerly dominant customs and traditions. To rebel against imperial might required concerted moral deliberation, and that required a “liberty of free inquiry.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Osborn explained how such conceptions of liberty empowered her decision to identify with the American cause. Habit, family inheritance, and moral weakness, as she recounted, could not prevent the exercise of her freedom to deliberate and then to choose to devote herself to Christ. She had “freely” trusted the promises of God in Christ. “Doth” the new believer not “choose Christ” and “receive Christ?” Her conversion had taught her that she could choose her loyalties and associations whatever her background and circumstances.Footnote ⁵¹

This conversion was applicable to revolution as well. After 1765, Osborn transposed familiar spiritual truths to politics, applying, she said, New Testament tropes of “bondage” and “liberty” to the “State.”Footnote ⁵² She was fired by notions of freedom to choose her religion and her national fealties.

Conclusions about Moral Liberty and Religious Establishment

New England Protestants, such as Osborn and their pastors, legitimated their political claims with an appeal to the free will that was integral to religious conversion. Free will prompted its adherents to resist imperial power. We might even say that it was liberatory. Yet, to return to the question posed by American state constitutions from the Revolutionary era, how was it that the framers of these constitutions viewed such a robust conception of moral freedom as compatible with a Protestant religious establishment?

The concept of liberty as traced in this paper, largely focused on New England, offers an answer.Footnote ⁵³ Writers such as Mayhew and Edwards asserted the notion of freedom as a power to make one’s choices regardless of external circumstances. They aimed to secure individuals’ sense of liberty despite customary loyalties, imperial might, and ecclesiastical tradition. They criticized Tory attempts to enforce statutes such as the Clarendon Code against dissent because they thought that such coercion could not compel genuine belief—indeed, diverted individuals from exercising their freedom to choose their religion.

They settled on a definition of liberty—including free will and deliberate choice—that attributed moral agency to all subjects. Preachers such as West, Langdon, and Hopkins counseled laypeople such as Osborn, and representatives to constitutional conventions, that individuals were free to choose their religion or national allegiance even in face of upbringing, social convention, or civil government. Moral liberty, they held, was inviolable, the ultimate recourse, even for those subjected to imperial tyranny. Decades of theological debate and political deliberation lay behind this revolutionary faith.

The result of their logic was ironic. They implicitly—and sometimes inadvertently—maintained that religious establishments of the sort encoded in state constitutions did not undermine religious liberty. Religious requirements for holding office or tax support for religious institutions did not threaten the power of will that was always active and therefore insulated from external force. Such logic did not necessarily apply to all political matters. The British monarch could impose imprisonment and even death—an end to all liberty. Yet it appeared to them to apply to religious matters, in which one could live under an establishment and still be free in one’s religious choices.

We can return here to Hannah Adams’s confidence in the progress of liberty in New England, including the Massachusetts constitution that sanctioned a Protestant establishment. She explained the apparent incongruity first by claiming that the state had come a long way from the old Puritan days of “intolerance,” when zeal “for uniformity of religion” led to the banishment of Quakers and imprisonment of Catholics. Second, and more to our point here, she insisted that the people had become so attached to the principle of free will that they had learned to follow their consciences however much the state upheld taxation for churches and religious requirements for office. She lauded the proliferation of “religious opinions” and denominations in Massachusetts—even the presence of a Roman Catholic congregation—as evidence of the power of liberty. For Adams and her fellow New Englanders, the idea that moral liberty was innate and unalienable not only justified revolution but also could accommodate the ways in which Revolutionary-era constitutions propped up establishments.Footnote ⁵⁴

In this sense, one could say that the Declaration of Rights in the state constitutions that affirmed the principles of religious liberty allowed for the religious establishments of state governments. To explore such reasoning is not to justify the constitutions’ concession to a Protestant establishment. It is to elucidate the reasons for the religious clauses of Revolutionary-era constitutions—to explain the mindsets of those who so believed in moral freedom that they did not come fully to terms with the ways in which the state could impose its will on its citizens.