Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730–1805. Группа авторов
such as the annual observation of January 30 as the execution day of the king-turned-tyrant, Charles I. Century sermons were preached to mark the Glorious Revolution’s centenary, on November 5, 1788, the anniversary of William III’s landing in England to secure it from popery and tyranny and to preserve traditional British liberties. The century sermon of Elhanan Winchester is included here (no. 33). Days of prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving were proclaimed for particular occasions throughout the eighteenth century and even earlier. Such times were nationally proclaimed (“recommended”) at least sixteen times by the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War; and the entire American community repaired to their various churches on such days of fasting, prayer, and humiliation to repent of sins, seek forgiveness, and implore God to lift the affliction of their suffering from them—the jeremiad form so central to American consciousness.18 Days of thanksgiving were likewise proclaimed when divine favor was experienced. The end of the war brought a great outpouring of praise and gratitude, and four sermons, nos. 24 through 27, reflect these sentiments. Such proclamations became rarer under the Constitution but did not disappear during Washington’s or Adams’s administrations, and their suspension during Jefferson’s administration was followed by a reinstatement under James Madison. The Fourth of July regularly occasioned political sermons as well as orations. The death of Washington evoked a universal grief and countless sermons extolling the character of the American Joseph; an example is that of Henry Holcombe, a Baptist, who preached in Savannah, Georgia (no. 49). The Boston Massacre sermons and orations commemorated the events of March 5, 1770, and the “Patriots’ Day” observances, as they are now called, marked the battles of Lexington and Concord in New England each year on April 19. Not only was such preaching widely attended, repeated, and published as tracts, but it was often reprinted in the newspapers as well.
This rhetorical form expressed the philosophical mean that free government is based on liberty, and liberty is founded in truth and justice as framed by eternal laws. Republicanism and virtue were far from split apart by James Madison and his colleagues at the Federal Convention, as the clergy understood our constitutional system. For these preachers and their flocks, the two remained essentially bound together. The political culture of this country was not only all the things it is most frequently said to be (I think of Bernard Bailyn’s five items), but was deeply rooted in the core religious consciousness articulated above all by the preachers; theirs were the pulpits of a new nation with a privileged, providential role in world history. What America’s religious consciousness consisted of in the tumultuous and triumphant years of founding is what this book will disclose.
| October 1990 | Ellis Sandoz* |
Thanks are due, for permission to reprint materials in their collections, to the Doheny Library of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, for one item (no. 17); to the Massachusetts Historical Society of Boston for one item (no. 19); to the American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, Massachusetts, for five items (nos. 3, 11, 12, 49, and 55); and to the Henry E. Huntington Library of San Marino, California, for the remaining forty-eight items in the book. Personal thanks go to Marcus A. McCorison, director, to John Hench, and to Keith Arbour at the American Antiquarian Society for their generous assistance. Because of two extended stays and a number of shorter visits at the Huntington Library, I owe many more debts of gratitude than I can repay here. But special thanks go to Robert Middlekauff (then director) and his wife Beverly for good counsel, assistance, and warm hospitality; also my gratitude is extended to Martin Ridge, who is director of research, and to Mary Wright, who supervises the Rare Book Reading Room. Among all the other helpful members of the Huntington staff, I especially thank Alan Jutzi, curator of rare books, and Tom Langen, who saw to the copying of over 4,000 pages of material from the rare book collection and who prepared the title-page photographs reproduced herein, except for those to nos. 3 and 11, which Marcus McCorison at the American Antiquarian Society provided. There can hardly be finer places to work than the Huntington Library and the American Antiquarian Society. Dean Charles R. Ritcheson, director of the Doheny Library, and his staff were helpful on more than one occasion with my work on this book. So also were the staffs of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Centenary College Library of Shreveport, Louisiana, and the Middleton Library and the Hill Memorial Library of Louisiana State University—and I am grateful.
I wish also to thank several institutions for financial support of my work on this book: Louisiana State University by a sabbatical leave; the Huntington Library by a Visiting Fellow’s appointment; and, by research grants, the Earhart Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Armstrong Foundation, and the Wilbur Foundation.
Liberty Fund is thanked for having the courage to undertake this large publication project and to see it through to completion. Individuals too numerous to be named here deserve thanks for rendering help great and small, but I must mention Dr. Gregory T. Russell, my graduate assistant during much of the preparation period for the work and later my colleague, who was of great assistance with the details. A similar word of thanks also is due my current graduate assistant, Manuel Brieske. Not least of all I hail all the librarians, those unsung heroes of a book such as this one, and most especially the cataloguers and bibliographers, for their wonderful, anonymous labors: without them we researchers would be lost.
Lastly, my family is again thanked for continuing to tolerate my strange habits and for helping me look up this or that and to read proof as time allowed and as I could catch them: Jonathan, Erica, Lisa, and Ellis III. My wife Alverne showed hitherto unsuspected skill as bibliographer and chief assistant in organizing a mass of material. My appreciation of them rises far above mere gratitude.
I hope all these benefactors and collaborators, having helped me with this project, will cherish the book and find their expectations for it at least partly fulfilled.
E. S.
Editor’s Note to the 1998 Edition
Reissue of Political Sermons of the American Founding Era in a two-volume edition allows inclusion of a comprehensive index to the work, one ably prepared by Linda Webster. The only other substantive addition to the original is a note identifying the seventeenth-century provenance of Item 24, entitled Defensive Arms Vindicated (at pages 712–713, herein).
Demand for the book has been steady over the years since first publication in 1991. This is gratifying to the editor, and doubtlessly reflects the importance of the subject matter and intrinsic interest of the material itself. More than this, however, the demand suggests that readers thirst for learning about the relatively unknown eighteenth-century religious and philosophical underpinnings of our American public order, at the time of the founding, and as it continues into the present. It may be that these documents intimate a kind of secret history, one yet to be fully written.
Ellis Sandoz
The fundamental aim of this collection has been to print original, editorially unannotated editions of previously published, complete sermons that permit the authors to speak fully for themselves. The genre is the political sermon, but broadly construed so as to embrace certain essays and orations, pieces that are sermonic in sense and tone—that is, hortatory and relating politics to convictions about eternal verities. A second aim has been not to duplicate anything printed in John Wingate Thornton’s fine old collection, The Pulpit of the American Revolution (Boston, 1860), since that volume is available in a reprint edition. With one exception, John Leland’s Rights of Conscience Inalienable (no. 37), we also have avoided anything printed in Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, eds., American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805 (Indianapolis, 1983), still available from Liberty Fund. Of other comparable collections known to us, that of Frank Moore, ed., The Patriot Preachers of the American Revolution, published by subscription in 1860,