To Love a Country

Chapter 1

Chosen: The Problem of Providence

Faith gives man a peculiar sense of his own dignity and importance. The believer finds himself distinguished above other men, exalted above the natural man; he knows himself to be a person of distinction, in the possession of peculiar privileges; believers are aristocrats, unbelievers plebeians. —Ludwig Feuerbach, “The Contradiction of Faith and Love”

America’s founders, mused Harriet Beecher Stowe, were children of two very different eras. They got their politics from the seventeenth century, in the social contract theory of John Locke and the English Whigs. They got their theology from the sixteenth century, in the fervid Calvinism of the Protestant Reformation. One taught equality, compromise, and rational self-interest. The other taught inequality and division, imparting a hard and heroic element to the American character.

This strange union between liberty and dogma, freedom and fire, has defined the American experience. Those gusts of providence that drove the colonies into independence left a complex and unstable legacy: a vision of unity without the reality, and a burning sense of entitlement. Dynamic in war but uneasy in debate, the doctrine of providence brought strength and fragility to the American character in equal measure. It planted a seed of theocracy in the soil of a democracy.

I

The democratic tradition began as the assertion of the rights of “freeborn Englishmen” against the corruptions and usurpations of kings, tracing its origins to a golden age of Anglo-Saxon freedom, before the Norman Conquest of 1066. What better evidence of the artifice of monarchy, wondered Thomas Paine, than the foreignness of England’s kings, and the fact that the English crown descended from William the Conqueror—a “French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives”? Democracy was doubt: the unmasking of prerogative as the vanity and conceit of ordinary men. England had known a few decent kings, Paine admitted, but had “groaned beneath a much larger number of bad ones.” If nature intended one man to reign, why had it so often given us “an ass for a lion”? One honest man, wrote Paine, was worth more “than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” For men like Paine, battered and bruised by an unforgiving class system, the assertion of human dignity required an attitude of aggression, a flash of native pride. If that purest blood, running through the royal family, could be shown to be foreign, so much the better.

To quibble with the divine right of kings was not to attack religion per se but a certain vision of the deity as a celestial enforcer. If there was a metaphysical foundation for popular sovereignty, it was the burning conviction that God has no favorites and is merciful to all—what one of Benjamin Rush’s biographers has termed “the loving heresy of universal salvation.” God is “no respecter of persons,” proclaimed the Levellers, a radical sect who produced the first truly democratic manifesto of the early modern period. If God was just, the notion of prerogative, or special entitlement, savored of blasphemy. The consequence of this reasoning was to turn the world upside down: Monarchy was exposed as a profane and violent usurper, while the will of the people was dignified and empowered. “This thing called prerogative,” protested one of the Levellers, “flows meerly from the wills and pleasures of Robbers, Rogues, and Theaves.” Monarchy was theft. Aristocracy was plunder. Democracy was a long struggle to pry the rights and liberties of the people “out of the pawes of those Kings, who by force had conquered the Nation, changed the lawes and by strong hand held them in bondage.”

This was strong dissent, a radical inversion. But was there a danger of creating a new idol called “the people,” or a new monarch called “the English nation”—commissioned to bring liberty to the world? Yes, thought the poet and philosopher John Milton, who wrestled with the idea of the chosen nation before rejecting it with chastened ferocity.

Had God singled out one nation to teach the others the ways of freedom? wondered Milton, like many Christian thinkers of his time. Perhaps so. Milton’s early republicanism combined awesome statements of equality and human potential with almost comical pride in England as the happy locus of an exceptional nation. England is the nation that brings the devil to confusion, a land “mightier” than Satan’s crafts: a strong people, inclined to liberty. Milton’s tribute to the intellectual powers of the common people has been quoted so many times it is easy to miss the fact that he is talking about a certain kind of people—his own. England was a nation of prophets and sages, men “of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit.” Milton’s republicanism is nationalism: a belief that political equality is possible because English people are uniquely fitted to the task—a “nation chosen before any other.” The idea soon appalled him.

Writing, five years later, in a work that arguably defined the democratic project, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton repented of these boasts. Liberty moves in minds, not nations, he now declared. Faith in nations was wasted energy. There was, he insisted, “a mutual bond of amity and brotherhood between man and man over all the World.” It is not distance or blood that makes enmity “but enmity that makes distance.” Whoever “keeps peace with me,” he writes, is my neighbor, whether he is “a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen.” England’s failed republic under Oliver Cromwell was a sad epiphany for Milton, showing that the English were courageous in war but not “over fertil” of wisdom and justice. Patriotism was a mistake and a distraction. Milton solemnly abandoned the notion of a unique and “covenanted” nation. “One’s country,” he wrote to a European correspondent in 1666, “is wherever it is well with one.”

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which supplied so many of the ingredients of the American Revolution, fell somewhere in the middle of this dilemma. It hated nationalism, as an engine of bigotry and war, but it embraced the nation-state as a vehicle of democracy. The notion that one nation is inherently superior to others was repugnant to Enlightenment sensibility, with its fervent belief in natural equality and universal reason. But if humans were rational and capable of virtue, they were also creatures of passion, given to violence and war. Freedom demanded law, and laws required a political community in which values were shared and consensus was possible. As Europe lurched from Wars of Religion to a permanent condition of jealous rivalry, philosophers like Voltaire looked to America as the harbinger of a more peaceful future, and their ideas began to shape it.

There are few golden ages in history, wrote Voltaire, but William Penn’s “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania was a sprightly contender. These “enemies of pomp,” as he affectionately described the Quakers, had reinvented the art of government, showing that it was possible to live in peace with one another, and one’s neighbors. Voltaire saw the Quakers, who “never bow to anybody,” and treat “kings and cobblers alike,” as pioneers of democracy, and a bracing model for a world drunk on status. Voltaire thought Penn the only governor who honored his treaties with the Native Americans, and he often threatened to move there himself, if he could handle the seasickness. “If I were forty,” he told Benjamin Franklin, shortly before his death in 1778, “I should go and settle in your happy fatherland.”

This was more than flattery. As Jill Lepore has observed, the seed of equality grew in the radicalism of eccentrics such as Benjamin Lay, a diminutive Quaker who registered his disgust for slavery by stretching his body across the entrance of houses of worship so that every member had to walk over him and ponder what it meant to own a human. The American Revolution, notes Lepore, did not begin in 1775. It began when people like Benjamin Lay trained a skeptical eye on the granite of caste and found that it was made of clay. It was a slow contagion, driven by self-interest as much as considerations of justice, but the change was palpable. As John Adams famously remarked, the war was not the revolution. The war was only the effect and consequence of the revolution, which occurred before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. “The Revolution was in the Minds of the People.”

Adams was no pacifist, but he knew that the principles of the revolution were larger than the passions of revolt, and in some ways opposed. The American political creed comprised a series of claims about natural rights, popular sovereignty, and the sanctity of the rule of law—a charter of transparency, building on decades of colonial self-government and centuries of English law. All power came from the people, filtered and refined through chambers of consent. Government was complex, with wheels within wheels, so that passion was always tempered by reason. As James Madison explained in The Federalist Papers, men are proud and slaves to self-love, always “contending for pre-eminence and power.” Americans could not assume that their advantages of learning would shield them from these visceral propensities. “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”