Discipline, Comfort, and the Uses of Providence
“Ours is a kind of struggle designed, dare I say, by Providence to try the patience, fortitude, and virtue of Man; none therefore that are engage in it will suffer themselves, I trust, to sink under difficulties or be discouraged by hardships.”
George Washington to Andrew Lewis, October 15, 1778
In November of 1772, Samuel Adams implored James Warren to exert himself to “awaken our Country men to a Sense of the danger they are in of immediate and perhaps irrecoverable Ruin.” Most people were under the influence of “every kind of opiate… which our enemies can invent.” Distraction and apathy were as lethal as the dangers themselves. It was predictable that the Tories would “spare no pains to disparage our measures.”
Adams had issued his Rights of the Colonists to limited fanfare. And yet, as Adams reminded Warren a few weeks later, “Nil desperandum—Never Despair. That is a motto for you and me. All are not dead; and where there is a spark of patriotick fire, we will enkindle it.”
At the time, it was not at all clear that the patriot cause would fully materialize. The committees of correspondence were still limited to Massachusetts. Organized, forceful resistance too was regionally restricted. Even there, by the end of the year, the furor sparked by the Boston Massacre had subsided and the colonial reactions like the Gaspee Affair threatened to be a flash in the pan. There were signs of life but not nearly enough. The Tea Party and Intolerable Acts were still a couple years away. For all that had happened, the galvanizing event that Adams was searching for had not yet come.
In the early 1770s, “Boston’s spirit of resistance, once vigorous, was faltering,” William Fowler recounts channeling Adams’ perspective. As Adams knew, political momentum requires constant injections of energy, especially energy fueled by outrage. It was rather unfortunate, in this regard, that thus far Britain had pulled its punches. Even the troops had been removed. The Declaratory Act seemed like inanimate parchment. For “Machiavellian” radical republican “Presbyterians” of “Oliverian principles” like Adams, the repeal of the Stamp Act was a pyrrhic victory. Sometimes a little breathing room is too great a luxury when there is work to be done, when enemies are not yet vanquished. Calm, quiet, return to normalcy was good for the Tories even with concessions to the colonists.
For Adams, this complacent lull was the most dangerous moment. The “indolence of men,” he complained to Arthur Lee, “their inattention to the real importance of things,” their unsteadiness, lack of stamina, vanity, and timidity—the human condition was the biggest threat, more than the Tory opposition. As things had cooled, patriots had turned their attention back to “private business for the support of their own families,” making it difficult for continued, organized, focused opposition to form. More than that, it seemed that most men were uninterested in the “rugged path of virtue.” The long train of abuses and usurpations was not quite long enough, yet.
Governor Hutchinson, for one, did not rest on his laurels. He reported to London that nothing was safe so long as the incendiary, malignant, criminal Samuel Adams was afoot. And he was successful for a time in luring Adams’ allies, even John Hancock, back into the comfort of normalcy. Hadn’t Adams overreacted a bit? All was well, and it is awfully exhausting to play the opposition all the time. The patriot coalition was dissipating.
But Adams kept organizing the Boston street gangs, printing propaganda in the Gazette, holding psalm sings, and frequenting the Liberty Tree (and Tavern). If people were well informed of the evils still in play, they would surely muster again. Adams admitted it would be an “arduous task” to “awaken a sufficient number in the colonies to so grand an undertaking.” The committees of correspondence, that is, the purpose of which was to reignite the flame. “Nothing however should be despaired of.”
Eventually, in a few short years, “Puritan Adams” would drag the colonies into the definitive contest. He never despaired of the cause or his own efforts because he never despaired of Providence. As Adams wrote to his wife, “I will endeavor by God’s Assistance to act my little part well, and trust everything which concerns me to his all-gracious Providence.”
By early 1773, Hutchingson’s reaction to Adams’ Rights of the Colonists was so thoroughly discrediting, and so clearly impressed upon the Massachusetts public their own subservience to parliament that there was no turning back. Hutchinson abdicated. The Tea Act and Coercive Acts soon followed, and the rest is history. Things can change fast. Never despair. But things change slowly. For Adams, the revolution was a decades long slog. Never despair. Or, if Vindex, Valerius Poplicola, or the Chatterer had been posting on X today, he would have advised, never black pill. J.D. Vance was right when he told a TPUSA crowd a few weeks ago that young conservative Americans tend to black pill. That is, to default to cynicism, pessimism, and impatience. Justice Clarence Thomas has recently relayed similar admonitions against cynical inaction.
Did we think all this would be easy? Did we really think complete and total victory was on the other side of a single election? Lamenting the distractions of “faction” and “party views,” George Washington reminded Joseph Reed in 1778, “Alas! We are not to expect that the path is to be strewed with flowers. That great and good Being who rules the Universe has disposed matters otherwise and for wise purposes, I am persuaded.”
Adams would have detested the pessimistic impulse. The red pill (i.e., oppositional awakening)? Sure. But never the clear pill (i.e., quiet resignation) and certainly not the black pill. Cynicism and pessimism are at a certain level cathartic and juvenile. There is a fine line between realism and fatalism. The political right today (let’s call it the patriot cause) has good reason for realism, even skepticism, and plenty of reason for outrage. The past few months have been frustrating, but things are, in fact, happening.
Generally speaking, the right lacks patience and fortitude. It is emotionally fragile and a bit scatterbrained. Perhaps the primary thing that distinguishes the modern left from the modern right is that the former is capable of enduring setbacks, even severe losses, without losing its focus and determination; the latter is not.
This is at least partially explained by the retention by the left of the central American doctrine I outlined at American Mind last week: Providence. The left’s belief in and use of this doctrine manifests in bastardized form, to be sure. It is shorn of all recognizably historic Christian articulation and expression. Yet the sense of eschatological, historical, and moral confidence remains. This hope supplies patience and perseverance even amid defeat. James Carville might get frustrated, but he is never truly deterred.
I have explained before how twentieth-century progressives retained this aspect of political Protestantism while conservatives sanitized their faction of Protestant influence. Providence is central to the theocratic element that the left has maintained and the right has discarded. Ironically, it is the right that is more susceptible to the immanent frame of modernity. The left—godless it may be—is working out the eschaton, or at least an eschaton. It is supremely confident in the justice of its cause. The right stares at the ground; the left scans the horizon. The left speaks in moral and marshal terms; the right muddles in the moment (and among themselves). Without a belief in an abiding Providence despair will continue to grip the right; it will develop no fortitude or focus.
The doctrine of Providence not only strengthened ambition and inspired achievement in eighteenth century Americans. The explanatory power of Providence vis a vis the Protestant work ethic, or as Niall Ferguson rightly calls it, word ethic, is potent. But this is perhaps not even the primary use of the doctrine.
Confidence to act was rooted in comfort amid adversity that Providence supplied. The founders were able to endure not only political but personal hardship. There’s more to life than electoral politics. Readoption of a Protestant Providentialism would better the lives of a despairing people in more ways than one. Nearly all the founders lost children or wives, or both. Samuel Adams had once been a widower. Franklin’s four-year-old died of smallpox. John Witherspoon’s son died in battle. Jefferson’s wife died shortly after the war and not before suffering multiple miscarriages. Four of the Jefferson children that exited the womb died in childhood and another by age 25. This was all typical of eighteenth-century life from which even great men were not excepted. These men certainly embodied President Trump’s advice to stay busy, but this doesn’t sufficiently explain their perseverance. It is a Protestant work ethic, after all.
The “cosmic optimism” of the founders was sober. In other words, they had a theological explanation for both hope and suffering. Said Washington to Bryan Fairfax in 1778, “The determinations of Providence are always wise—often inscrutable—and, tho its decrees appear to bear hard upon us at times, is, nevertheless meant for gracious purposes.”
Adherence to Providence also properly orients our time horizon and tempers our expectations for the present, for what we can accomplish in a lifetime. Providence brings perspective. Overwhelmed with exhaustion, Washington still trusted in Providence. As he confided to General John Armstrong in 1781,
“Our affairs are brought to an awful crisis, that the hand of Providence, I trust, may be more conspicuous in our deliverance. The many remarkable interpositions of the divine governmt in the hours of our deepest distress and darkness have been too luminous to suffer me to doubt the happy Issue of the present contest but the period for its accomplishmt may be too far distant for a person of my years, whose Morning & Evening hours—and every moment (unoccupied by business)—pants for retirement; & for those domestic and rural enjoyments which in my estimation far surpasses the hig[h]est pageantry of this world.”
The purpose of suffering and setbacks may be judgment for grave sin, or it might be discipline. Virtue and piety are forged in discipline. Or adversity might simply be, as Washington said, for God’s glory and credit. In any case, despair is inappropriate. Awareness of Providence instills fortitude and patience. Life, especially political life, is not a path strewed with flowers.
The Spirit of ’76, Archibald Willard (1875). Wikimedia Commons.
