America's first coup--liberty vs. government

A vital question about Liberty came up in early colonial America completely unlike any discussion in Europe. It reminds me of the protests against governors over freeing the economy in the midst of the coronavirus.  Luther had first written The Liberty of a Christian in which he noted that God indwells righteousness within a Christian causing him to do rightly, contrary to the natural thing of sin.  Without liberty of conscience, godliness is impossible. When 200 Pilgrims and 3000 Puritans (both Calvinist, similar beliefs) came to Massachusetts 1620-1633, they too associated liberty with godliness. One gets guidance directly from following God’s holy writ.  But how to define liberty? [loosely, liberty is “doing what one wants”] To the Puritans liberty and religion were inseparable and Catholicism was anti-liberty. But when did the exercise of liberty become lawless?  Every leader of New England tackled this point at some time or another.  Who rules?  Each man in liberty or a magistrate?

            John Winthrop, an Anglican, was sent as Governor to the Massachusetts colony (to keep an eye on the Puritans) in 1630.  He pondered the question as well.  In his view, liberty is to be subject to all authority as said by Paul in Romans. Well, fine in theory.  In practice Winthrop could be stern and brutal and people felt he exceeded his legitimate bounds.  Colonists had a strong English sense of living under the law, not under a powerful individual.  They swarmed his office, charged him with flouting their charter, and in a meeting deposed him in 1634.  They set up what was a representative government and replaced him with Thomas Dudley-- the first political coup in the history of North America.

            That didn’t mean that government got better.  The colony was shaken by controversy with Roger Williams. Williams was of the each-man-liberty persuasion.  The only thing that mattered was the inner Light of Faith, a gift of God’s Grace.  But the more orthodox held that good behavior was also needed.  Williams whipped up the religious issue until it came to a gathering of the colony, May 17, 1637.  It was a religious topic but behind it was the question of good, orderly government.  If Williams had his way, it was contested, religion and government would cease to be based on reasoned argument, evidence, and learning, but rather everyone would claim to be inspired by the Holy Spirit and anarchy would arise. But Orthodoxy won the day, Winthrop was re-elected governor to resume his way of punishment, exclusion, and banishment. This was, fascinatingly enough, America’s first contested election.

             However, no sooner elected, Winthrop went bankrupt.  Puritans did not assume that poverty was a sign of wickedness, but they did say that persistent failure was a lack of God’s favor.  So he was in and out of office until 1649.

            Williams also believed that God did not covenant with a congregation or entire society but with an individual alone.  The upshot is that each man is entitled to his own interpretation of the truth about religion (‘soul liberty’, held by Baptists today).  But, he argued, in order to make a civil society function at all this meant there had to be an absolute separation of church and state.   To the governing council, this was heresy and they planned to exile Williams back to England.  Winthrop secretly disagreed and warned Williams what was up.  Williams fled to the south where he befriended Naragansetts and eventually got the English Parliament to grant him and his followers a new charter as Rhode Island.

            So the concerns about where freedom ends and authority begins, began in the very beginning of colonial America.  50 years later at Oxford, John Locke would codify Luther’s Liberty of a Christian, in Two Treatises on Government. It is no wonder then that Revolutionary Americans rushed to Locke as the answer when the Mother Country just yawned. We’d been arguing about it for over a century among ourselves.