EARLY FREETHOUGHT IN THE UNITED STATES
1. Perhaps the most signal of all the proofs of the change wrought
in the opinion of the civilized world in the eighteenth century is
the fact that at the time of the War of Independence the leading
statesmen of the American colonies were deists. Such were Benjamin
Franklin, the diplomatist of the Revolution; Thomas Paine, its prophet
and inspirer; Washington, its commander; and Jefferson, its typical
legislator. But for these four men the American Revolution probably
could not have been accomplished in that age; and they thus represent
in a peculiar degree the power of new ideas, in fit conditions,
to transform societies, at least politically. On the other hand,
the fashion in which their relation to the creeds of their time has
been garbled, alike in American and English histories, proves how
completely they were in advance of the average thought of their day;
and also how effectively the mere institutional influence of creeds
can arrest a nation's mental development. It is still one of the
stock doctrines of religious sociology in England and America that
deism, miscalled atheism, wrought the Reign of Terror in the French
Revolution; when as a matter of fact the same deism was at the head
of affairs in the American.
2. The rise of rationalism in the colonies must be traced in the main
to the imported English literature of the eighteenth century; for
the first Puritan settlements had contained at most only a fraction
of freethought; and the conditions, so deadly for all manner even
of devout heresy, made avowed unbelief impossible. The superstitions
and cruelties of the Puritan clergy, however, must have bred a silent
reaction, which prepared a soil for the deism of the next age. [1641]
"The perusal of Shaftesbury and Collins," writes Franklin with
reference to his early youth, "had made me a skeptic," after being
"previously so as to many doctrines of Christianity." [1642] This
was in his seventeenth or eighteenth year, about 1720, so that the
importation of deism had been prompt. [1643] Throughout life he held
to the same opinion, conforming sufficiently to keep on fair terms
with his neighbours, [1644] and avoiding anything like critical
propaganda; though on challenge, in the last year of his life, he
avowed his negatively deistic position. [1645]
3. Similarly prudent was Jefferson, who, like Franklin and Paine,
extolled the Gospel Jesus and his teachings, but rejected the
notion of supernatural revelation. [1646] In a letter written so
late as 1822 to a Unitarian correspondent, while refusing to publish
another of similar tone, on the score that he was too old for strife,
he declared that he "should as soon undertake to bring the crazy
skulls of Bedlam to sound understanding as to inculcate reason into
that of an Athanasian." [1647] His experience of the New England
clergy is expressed in allusions to Connecticut as having been
"the last retreat of monkish darkness, bigotry, and abhorrence
of those advances of the mind which had carried the other States
a century ahead of them"; and in congratulations with John Adams
(who had written that "this would be the best of all possible worlds
if there were no religion in it"), when "this den of the priesthood
is at last broken up." [1648] John Adams, whose letters with their
"crowd of skepticisms" kept even Jefferson from sleep, [1649] seems
to have figured as a member of a Congregationalist church, while
in reality a Unitarian. [1650] Still more prudent was Washington,
who seems to have ranked habitually as a member of the Episcopal
church; but concerning whom Jefferson relates that, when the clergy,
having noted his constant abstention from any public mention of the
Christian religion, so penned an address to him on his withdrawal from
the Presidency as almost to force him to some declaration, he answered
every part of the address but that, which he entirely ignored. It is
further noted that only in his valedictory letter to the governors of
the States, on resigning his commission, did he speak of the "benign
influence of the Christian religion" [1651]--the common tone of the
American deists of that day. It is further established that Washington
avoided the Communion in church. [1652] For the rest, the broad fact
that all mention of deity was excluded from the Constitution of the
United States must be historically taken to signify a profound change
in the convictions of the leading minds among the people as compared
with the beliefs of their ancestors. At the same time, the fact that
they as a rule dissembled their unbelief is a proof that, even where
legal penalties do not attach to an avowal of serious heresy, there
inheres in the menace of mere social ostracism a power sufficient to
coerce the outward life of public and professional men of all grades,
in a democratic community where faith maintains and is maintained by
a competitive multitude of priests. With this force the freethought
of our own age has to reckon, after Inquisitions and blasphemy laws
have become obsolete.
4. Nothing in American culture-history more clearly proves the last
proposition than the case of Thomas Paine, the virtual founder of
modern democratic freethought in Great Britain and the States. [1653]
It does not appear that Paine openly professed any heresy while he
lived in England, or in America before the French Revolution. Yet
the first sentence of his Age of Reason, of which the first part was
written shortly before his imprisonment, under sentence of death from
the Robespierre Government, in Paris (1793), shows that he had long
held pronounced deistic opinions. [1654] They were probably matured
in the States, where, as we have seen, such views were often privately
held, though there, as Franklin is said to have jesuitically declared
in his old age, by way of encouraging immigration: "Atheism is unknown;
infidelity rare and secret, so that persons may live to a great age
in this country without having their piety shocked by meeting with
either an atheist or an infidel." Paine did an unequalled service
to the American Revolution by his Common Sense and his series of
pamphlets headed The Crisis: there is, in fact, little question that
but for the intense stimulus thus given by him at critical moments
the movement might have collapsed at an early stage. Yet he seems
to have had no thought there and then of avowing his deism. It was
in part for the express purpose of resisting the ever-strengthening
attack of atheism in France on deism itself that he undertook to save
it by repudiating the Judæo-Christian revelation; and it is not even
certain that he would have issued the Age of Reason when it did appear,
had he not supposed he was going to his death when put under arrest,
on which score he left the manuscript for publication. [1655]
5. Its immediate effect was much greater in Britain, where his Rights
of Man had already won him a vast popularity in the teeth of the most
furious reaction, than in America. There, to his profound chagrin, he
found that his honest utterance of his heresy brought on him hatred,
calumny, ostracism, and even personal and political molestation. In
1797 he had founded in Paris the little "Church of Theo-philanthropy,"
beginning his inaugural discourse with the words: "Religion has two
principal enemies, Fanaticism and Infidelity, or that which is called
atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality;
the other by natural philosophy." [1656] These were his settled
convictions; and he lived to find himself shunned and vilified, in the
name of religion, in the country whose freedom he had so puissantly
wrought to win. [1657] The Quakers, his father's sect, refused him a
burial-place. He has had sympathy and fair play, as a rule, only from
the atheists whom he distrusted and opposed, or from thinkers who no
longer hold by deism. There is reason to think that in his last years
the deistic optimism which survived the deep disappointments of the
French Revolution began to give way before deeper reflection on the
cosmic problem, [1658] if not before the treatment he had undergone at
the hands of Unitarians and Trinitarians alike. The Butlerian argument,
that Nature is as unsatisfactory as revelation, had been pressed upon
him by Bishop Watson in a reply to the Age of Reason; and though, like
most deists of his age, he regarded it as a vain defence of orthodoxy,
he was not the man to remain long blind to its force against deistic
assumptions. Like Franklin, he had energetically absorbed and given out
the new ideals of physical science; his originality in the invention of
a tubular iron bridge, and in the application of steam to navigation,
[1659] being nearly as notable as that of Franklin's great discovery
concerning electricity. Had the two men drawn their philosophy from
the France of the latter part of the century instead of the England
of the first, they had doubtless gone deeper. As it was, temperamental
optimism had kept both satisfied with the transitional formula; and in
the France of before and after the Revolution they lived pre-occupied
with politics.
6. The habit of reticence or dissimulation among American public men
was only too surely confirmed by the treatment meted out to Paine. Few
stood by him; and the vigorous deistic movement set up in his latter
years by Elihu Palmer soon succumbed to the conditions, [1660] though
Palmer's book, The Principles of Nature (1802, rep. by Richard Carlile,
1819), is a powerful attack on the Judaic and Christian systems all
along the line. George Houston, leaving England after two years'
imprisonment for his translation of d'Holbach's Ecce Homo, went to
New York, where he edited the Minerva (1822), reprinted his book,
and started a freethought journal, The Correspondence. That, however,
lasted only eighteen months. All the while, such statesmen as Madison
and Monroe, the latter Paine's personal friend, seem to have been of
his way of thinking, [1661] though the evidence is scanty. Thus it came
about that, save for the liberal movement of the Hicksite Quakers,
[1662] the American deism of Paine's day was decorously transformed
into the later Unitarianism, the extremely rapid advance of which in
the next generation is the best proof of the commonness of private
unbelief. The influence of Priestley, who, persecuted at home, went to
end his days in the States, had doubtless much to do with the Unitarian
development there, as in England; but it seems certain that the whole
deistic movement, including the work of Paine and Palmer, had tended
to move out of orthodoxy many of those who now, recoiling from the
fierce hostility directed against the outspoken freethinkers, sought
a more rational form of creed than that of the orthodox churches. The
deistic tradition in a manner centred in the name of Jefferson, and the
known deism of that leader would do much to make fashionable a heresy
which combined his views with a decorous attitude to the Sacred Books.