"As men and Protestant Christians"

The Suffolk Resolves, Samuel Adams, and American Protestantism

“That the late Act of Parliament for establishing the Roman-Catholic religion and the French laws, in that extensive country now called Canada, is dangerous in an extreme degree to the Protestant religion, and to the civil rights and liberties of all America; and therefore, as men and Protestant Christians, we are indispensably obliged to take all proper measures for our security.”

That’s the Suffolk Resolves (1774), written by (as the name suggests) leaders of Suffolk County, Massachusetts in reaction to the “Intolerable Acts,” and later endorsed by the Continental Congress in the same year. In popular lore, the focus of that drafting body was the Port Act, Quartering Act, Government Act, and Administration Act. Usually, the Tea Act (1773) Sugar Act (1764), and Stamp Act (1765) are colloquially lumped in to comprise the legal apparatus that spurred the colonist on to eventual war. (Of course, the Intolerable Acts were a response to the Boston Tea Party (1773).)

What is usually ignored is the outsized (from our perspective) impact of the Quebec Act, passed the same year and parliamentary session as the other intolerable ones. The latter was, perhaps, the most intolerable from the colonist perspective. (The late Forrest McDonald certainly says so in his magisterial Novus Ordo Seclorum.) The Quebec Act is exactly what the Suffolk Resolves is referring to in the quote above.

Briefly, the Quebec Act extended the territory of the Province into Ohio and what is now the Midwest, which challenged some at least colonist understanding of land grants, and was generally considered a direct afront to Massachusetts. More importantly, the Act permitted Catholics to serve as public officials in the Province and allowed Jesuits to return thereto. Prior oaths of office for Royal provinces since the time of Elizabeth I were discarded in favor of a new one that made no mention of Protestantism.

The expansion and legal recognition of Catholicism, and especially Jesuits, was conceived as a national security threat and, to some, secreted a counter-Reformation, papist aroma, giving rise to all manner of conspiracy theories surrounding George III’s true intentions for the manner of colonial subjugation.

Even prior to the Quebec Act, similar rhetoric to that of the Resolves was floating around. Most notably, Samuel Adams’ The Rights of Colonists (1772) featured a sharp but traditionally Protestant anti-Catholicism.

Adams—who, per Ira Stoll’s superb biography, had more influence on the formation of the Constitution and public opinion generally than is usually appreciated—begins with colonial rights known by or attributed to nature. (Very, typically, early modern to begin in this fashion, by the way.) Most simply, these are life, liberty, and property. No surprises there for the period. He goes on to do equally predictable social compact stuff.

Then it gets interesting, which is not to say less conventional—that’s the whole point here. All positive (civil) laws must conform to “the law of natural reason and equity.” Next, rights of conscience:

“As neither reason requires nor religion permits the contrary, every man living in or out of a state of civil society has a right peaceably and quietly to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.”

What kind of “God”? We’ll see soon. But further,

““Just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty,” in matters spiritual and temporal, is a thing that all men are clearly entitled to by the eternal and immutable laws of God and nature, as well as by the law of nations and all well-grounded municipal laws, which must have their foundation in the former.”

Mutual toleration of “different professions” of religion is sensible practice, he says. This is a posture upon which “Christians” are agreed to proceed so long as civil society is not damaged thereby. Adams follows John Locke (explicitly) in establishing the bounds of this toleration as limited by those “sects” that “teach doctrines subversive of the civil government.”

“The Roman Catholics or Papists are excluded by reason of such doctrines as these, that princes excommunicated may be deposed, and those that they call heretics may be destroyed without mercy; besides their recognizing the Pope in so absolute a manner, in subversion of government, by introducing, as far as possible into the states under whose protection they enjoy life, liberty, and property, that solecism in politics, imperium in imperio, leading directly to the worst anarchy and confusion, civil discord, war, and bloodshed.”

As Anabaptists were treated in the seventeenth century (i.e., civilly subversive), so the papists were perceived in much of eighteenth-century America. The very purpose of government, on Adams’ compact theory, is security and equitable rule. Anything that subverts those ends subverts government itself. And Catholicism was then feared as inherently tyrannical not just in faith but in state, insofar as it maintained in the latter case the authority to overthrow civil rule for its own interests, something to which the colonists had not agreed (i.e., they were Protestants, and the Papacy was a foreign power). Or so the theory went.

In the subsequent section, Adams moves beyond natural rights, which have already become quite religious for our tastes, and moves to the rights of colonists as Christians. These are supplied by “the institutes of the great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Chruch, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament.” Again, we return to the rights of conscience for “all Christians” sans the Catholics. This was a British right implied in the Magna Charta and affirmed by William Blackstone, says Adams, vigilant assertion of which is required to avoid “total destruction and oblivion.”

Adams continues his tract by transitioning to the rights of colonists as British subjects, much of which would be material more familiar to many readers but is nonetheless worth the read.

I’ll say no more for now except that this short story informs us of the early American religious self-conception (and causality of the war) as fundamentally Christian and of the Protestant variety—what else existed besides the mutually exclusive categories of Catholic and Protestant? —more than monotonous regurgitations of Jefferson’s correspondence (read through a post-Warren court era lens). Other “founders” were influential, and other texts should inform our perception of the intellectual milieu besides a letter to some Connecticut Baptists.

From our reading of the Suffolk reactionaries and the elder Adams cousin, we can see two sources of political animation: rights of men, and rights of Protestants—both of which were English—and it is not clear that the two could be neatly separated in their minds.