All Honor to Jefferson?
In 1861, Abraham Lincoln famously said of the Declaration of Independence that it “gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but to the world, for all future time.” In a letter to Henry Pierce in 1859, Lincoln called the Declaration “definitions and axioms of a free society.” Lincoln taught himself Euclid, so he knew a thing or two about axioms. In the letter to Pierce, Lincoln famously gave “all honor to Jefferson” for expressing an “abstract truth” that would serve as a “rebuke and a stumbling block” to tyranny and oppression. What would Jefferson have thought of such honor? Did he see himself as the proponent of an “abstract truth?”
In the final years of his life, Jefferson reflected on the Declaration in two letters. Writing from Monticello to Henry Lee on May 8, 1825, Jefferson spoke to the intent and content of the Declaration of Independence and called it the “expression of American Whigs forced to resort to arms and appeal to the tribunal of the world for justification.” But Jefferson did not consider the Declaration to be unique, nor did he seek accolades for originality. In fact, Jefferson denied it to be original in principle or sentiment but called it “an expression of the American mind” whose authority rested on a host of expressions including “the elementary books of public right” such as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney. Jefferson asserted that the Declaration did not seek to “find out new principles, or new arguments . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.”
In short, Jefferson knew that what he said was not abstract truth but a reflection of wisdom in human experience expressed by seminal authors. Jefferson reflected on the Declaration one last time in 1826 when invited to join other signers of the Declaration in Washington. In his last known correspondence, the elderly Jefferson offered a final meditation on the great document. Like Lincoln, Jefferson said that he believed the Declaration to be pregnant with the fate of the world and hoped to open all eyes to the rights of man. As Jefferson closed his letter, he expressed hope that the Declaration would serve as a signal arousing men to “burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves,” and to take up self-government. The light of science, he claimed, “laid open to every view, the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
It is a great metaphor, but one does not glean political equality or inequality from science. Jefferson got his idea from an English Protestant who participated in a tyrannicide and merely did what many of that age did, especially his friend Benjamin Franklin: he took a particularly powerful idea that someone else had already said and cast it as his own.
The Protestant Who Inspired Thomas Jefferson
The man who originally made this point about men not being born booted or saddled was Richard Rumbold. Rumbold served under Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War, was a guard at the execution of Charles I, and was later part of the Rye House Plot against Charles II. For his troubles, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason in 1685. At his execution, Rumbold told the crowd, “I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.”
Rumbold then took the occasion of his scaffold speech to deny that he was against monarchy. He was not a radical or a populist railing against a royalist swamp. This wasn’t a seventeenth-century “No Kings” protest. Rumbold was a constitutionalist: a man who believed in the rule of law. Rumbold says that it was “ever my thought that kingly government was the best of all where properly executed.” “I mean,” he added, “such as it was by our ancient laws—that is, a king, and a legal, free-chosen Parliament — the king having, as I conceive, power enough to make him great; the people also as much property as to make them happy; they being, as it were, contracted to one another!”
Where could Rumbold have gotten such an idea? The knee-jerk response, even among many educated Americans, is “Ah hah! John Locke!” The problem is that Locke’s famous Two Treatises had not yet been published. We can only understand Rumbold’s statement by placing it in the long tradition of English constitutionalism and constitutionalism in general.
An essential part of constitutionalism is the belief in the law of God. Rumbold went on to say, “And who will deny me that this was not the justly constituted government of our nation? How absurd is it, then, for men of sense to maintain that tho the one party of his contract break all conditions, the other should be obliged to perform their part?” To support this argument about men and kings under law as a binding contract, Rumbold does not repair to science. Rather, Rumbold says that the idea of absolute rule is an “error contrary to the law of God, the law of nations, and the law of reason.” Rumbold sounds more like the Jefferson of ’76 and the Declaration than the Jefferson of 1826.
Furthermore, Rumbold does not proclaim some abstract equality of all men, as Lincoln said of the Declaration, but rather asserts their equal station under the law with particular vocations marked out for them by God. Sounding more medieval than modern, Rumbold says, “I am well satisfied that God hath wisely ordered different stations for men in the world, as I have already said . . . kings having as much power as to make them great and the people as much property as to make them happy.” The law grants power and right to fit men’s station as reason and nature, not expediency or will, dictate.
Constitutionalism and Revolution Rightly Understood
What happens, however, when rulers seize power contrary to what law and reason grant? In the Declaration, Jefferson writes, “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” To assert such a right should not upset a lawful or constitutional civil order but should instead support and preserve it.
To understand this point clearly, we have to lean on a whole host of Protestants beyond just Rumbold. And to understand the American debt to those Protestants, we turn to one of the most cerebral constitutionalists of the Revolutionary and Founding generation: John Adams. In 1786, Adams began a three-volume defense of American constitutionalism. In his third volume, he identifies three periods in which the principles of government were, as Adams puts it, “anxiously studied.” All three were Protestant movements against Catholic opponents. The first period Adams identifies as the Reformation. In this period, Adams singles out a work published by an English bishop in exile: John Ponet’s anonymously published A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (1556). Adams says that Ponet’s work contained “all the essential principles of liberty” and influenced both Algernon Sidney and John Locke. Adams’s second period is the Interregnum, the tempestuous period of 1640-1660, and he cites the work of John Milton and James Harrington as well as the anonymously published work of a French Huguenot, later republished in English, the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579). All three authors came to be associated with the American Revolution. Adams’s third is the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which produced Sidney, Locke, the work of Bishop Hoadley (who influenced Jonathan Mayhew), and Cato’s Letters.
Why did Adams include in his first two periods, in addition to Milton and Harrington, two works generally omitted from histories of political thought: the work of an English Protestant bishop in exile and a French Huguenot, especially when these books were born of the religious warfare that Adams (like his friend Jefferson) abhorred? Furthermore, why is Adams highlighting periods of revolution in British history? Aren’t revolutions lawless and violent affairs bringing disorder — the opposite of law and order? The answer to both questions lies in what the constitutional character of a good revolution should be and the effect of revolutions on the development of constitutionalism. Adams recognized the constitutional focus in these three periods — the Reformation, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and the Glorious Revolution — and their continuity in developing English constitutionalism. Protestantism was at the heart of all three events, and therefore at the heart of the English constitution.
Protestant Theories of Just Revolution
As Protestants and Catholics faced off domestically and internationally over two centuries, they needed defensible theories of warfare as well as resistance and rebellion. They drew from medieval or even ancient precedent. One of the important precedents that Protestants adopted was not to think that violent resistance was the first or even best remedy. Tyranny could be the chastising work of God to prompt repentance. The victims of tyranny could also hide or go into exile, a precedent going back to Polycarp. Protestant leaders were also careful to distinguish themselves from Anabaptist radicals (who sometimes led violent riots) or ecclesiastical subterfuge such as the papal excommunication of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I.
Martin Luther discouraged rebellion but recognized that there were tyrants who, by definition, commanded where they had neither right nor power. He and his collaborator, Philipp Melanchthon, allowed for self-defense against such rulers. Their arguments drew from scholasticism and extended back to the Code of Justinian. Magistrates who punished good and rewarded evil inverted the Apostle Paul’s charge to them in Romans 13 to reward good and punish evil and thus betrayed their charge from God. (Mayhew used the same argument later in his famous 1750 sermon.)
Protestants also advanced an argument about the rights of interposition by lesser magistrates – an application of Romans 13 wherein magistrates had a duty to punish a wicked tyrant just as they would punish a wicked subject. Wickedness is wickedness, and magistrates are called to punish it regardless of who commits it. This idea of interposition by other magistrates against a lawless tyrant is popularly associated with John Calvin and his Institutes of the Christian Religion, but it was also advanced by Calvin’s contemporaries such as Peter Martyr and Henry Bullinger. Interposition is advocated in the Lutheran Magdeburg Confession of 1550.
But interposition did not mean, as some have interpreted Calvin, that any magistrate could resist any higher power simply by virtue of being a magistrate. The right of “interposition” is a very precise summons to action. Calvin indicates in his Institutes and elsewhere that it was intended only where such checks are constitutionally warranted (as Calvin explicitly suggested by Greek, Roman, or medieval precedent). In cases of rebellion that sought Calvin’s imprimatur, including some in France and Scotland led by persecuted Protestants, Calvin only gave his approval to one in France. He was very careful to prescribe only a constitutional rebellion. Space does not permit explication on this point of interposition in the American case (and I’ve made the argument elsewhere), but because the Patriot movement was a dispute about constitutional powers. It required a lesser magistrate, empowered by the people and the colonial legislatures, for interposition.
Marian exiles, notably those in Geneva or Strasburg, publishing seditious works against Catholic monarchs, deployed arguments on sovereignty, authority, law, as well as the lawful extent of magisterial, ecclesiastical, and civil obligation. All of them combined some degree of both scripture and legal precedent. Ponet directed his argument primarily at ecclesiastical authorities more than at civil authorities but provided an argument for tyrannicide, wedding scripture to classicism, scholasticism, and common law – including a defense of property rights. Knox’s friend and colleague, Christopher Goodman, argued in How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyed (1558) that any magistrate who betrayed his responsibilities forsook legitimacy altogether. A century later, George Buchanan and Samuel Rutherford created even more articulate and humanistic theories of resistance. Rutherford, for example, was an encyclopedia of political thought, drawing on over 700 authors both sacred and secular without prejudice in his controversial Lex, Rex (1644).
Even more elaborate theories of constitutional resistance were articulated by French Protestants, blending rich and sometimes inventive histories with humanist precedents and legal arguments.
The aforementioned Vindiciae, for example, posited the existence of a multipart covenant that, once betrayed by the sovereign, justified taking up arms. The Vindiciae was preceded by Francis Hotman’s Francogallia (1573) and Beza’s (anonymously published) The Rights of Magistrates Over their Subjects (1574). Hotman provided an elaborate constitutional and legal argument from French history while Beza discerned an elaborate constitutional and contractual obligation to keep the king faithful to the law — by force if necessary. Both Hotman and Beza combined humanist and biblical sources. Most notable for comparison with the American Revolution is the way that Beza justified magistrates taking the initiative without the king (should he not call the estates) to organize themselves in opposition to him (much as Huguenot aristocrats did in the assemblées politiques). That reminds one of the appointment of authorities in the Continental Congress, for example, to mediate and organize opposition to imperial policy.
A Good Hanging Focuses the Mind
Of course, we do not owe constitutionalism, the rule of law, or fears of arbitrary power and tyranny — all central to the Declaration of Independence — to Protestantism. Foundational ideas of Western constitutionalism were articulated long before the Reformation. Nevertheless, the Reformation further sharpened constitutionalism in the crucible of conflict, just as questions of law and right flourished in conflicts over authority in the Roman Church a century before the Reformation. The magisterial reformers were also classically educated, able to borrow from history, ancient or medieval jurisprudence, or anywhere else that made sense. Because religious disputes were ultimately civil disputes, there was a symbiotic relationship between theology and legal theory as well.
Samuel Johnson asserted that an imminent hanging enables a wonderfully concentrated mind. Here is its political corollary: a credible threat of revolution has a wonderful ability to concentrate serious attention on constitutionalism: the right ordering of law and power, rights and liberties. Ideally, the threat does not come to blows. Our own revolutions — the American Revolution, Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion under the Articles of Confederation, or the Civil War — likewise forced important questions about constitutional powers and the rule of law. They were not merely acts of unrestrained and expedient force.
One last American debt to Protestant political thought deserves attention at the close. John Bradshaw famously proclaimed at the prosecution of Charles I, “Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would propose this as the motto of the United States in 1776, accompanied by a rendering of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea to flee the tyranny of Pharaoh. May any celebration that Americans have of our Independence 250 years later dwell not merely on our freedoms. Let us also remember how true freedom is enabled by obedience, authority, and law rightly understood. As Christians, we should understand this much better than others.
