HORACE WALPOLE rose from his seat in the British House of Commons to report on the "extraordinary proceedings" which had lately occurred in the far-off colonies of the New World.
"There is no good crying about the matter," said Walpole sadly. "Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it."
That "Presbyterian parson" was none other than the Reverend Dr. John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Walpole had every reason to suspect Witherspoon's personal involvement in this "Presbyterian Rebellion." For none other than George Washington had remarked that, when he took command of the Continental Army in June, 1775, he "abhorred the idea of independence." Thomas Jefferson was similarly inclined as late as August, 1775, when he wrote: "I would rather be in dependence on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation on Earth, or than on no nation."
While Jefferson had changed his mind by the time he submitted the Declaration to colonial leaders for approval, the Continental Congress itself hesitated to sign so radical a document.
It was then that Dr. Witherspoon, a lineal descendant of Scotland's fiery preacher-patriot John Knox, rose from his seat to address his wavering comrades.
"There is a tide in the affairs of men," said Witherspoon. "We perceive it now before us. To hesitate is to consent to our own slavery. That noble instrument (The Declaration of Independence) should be subscribed this very morning by every pen in this house."
Witherspoon left no doubt that he himself fully intended to sign that "noble instrument." "For my own part," he declared, "of property I have some, of reputation more. That reputation is staked, that property is pledged on the issue of the contest.
"And although these gray hairs must soon descend into the sepulchre," he added, "I would infinitely rather that they descend thither by the hand of the executioner than desert at this crisis the sacred cause of my country."
Of course, Witherspoon's outright support for the cause of independence was not shared by all clergymen in the colonies. For example, Jonathan Odell, a Tory and an Anglican priest, fled to the British lines in 1777, where he composed snide ditties about the American patriots. Here, in part, is what he wrote about Dr. John Witherspoon:
To fall by Witherspoon!-O name, the curse
Of sound religion, and disgrace of verse.
Member of Congress, we must hail him next:
"Come out of Babylon," was now his text. . .
Whilst to myself I've hummed, in dismal tune,
I'd rather be a dog than Witherspoon.
But the Presbyterian clergy lined up solidly in favor of independence from Great Britain. While a leading Pennsylvania Loyalist informed a British parliamentary committee in 1774 that the Crown's chief opponents were "Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Smugglers," the rector of New York City's famous Trinity Episcopal Church filed this report with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts:
I have it from good authority that the Presbyterian ministers, at a Synod where most of them in the middle colonies were collected, passed a resolve to support the Continental Congress in all their measures. This, and this only, can account for the uniformity of their conduct; for I do not know one of them, nor have I been able, after strict inquiry, to hear of any, who did not, by preaching and every effort in their power, promote all the measures of the Congress, however extravagant.
Alexis de Tocqueville compared the blatantly antireligious French Revolution to America's War of Independence. "In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions," he wrote. "But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country."
A German historian gave the reason for this happy marriage between religion and human freedom. "John Calvin," declared Leopold von Ranke, "was the virtual founder of America.
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