CHAPTER 7. THE INTERNAL REVOLUTION

The colonial scene between the Stamp Act Crisis of 1766 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773, is essentially one witnessing the decline of the radicals and the resurgence of the conservatives. The radicals, Sam Adams and his waterfront ruffians, Patrick Henry and his frontiersmen, were without any clear issues to exploit and might have become totally eclipsed during this period. However, just when the radical cause appeared to be languishing, serendipidy or the British ministry would bungle and provide a convenient issue for them to exploit.

The first such issue was handed the radicals by Charles Townshend, His Majesty's Chancellor of the Exchequer. Old Champagne Charlie" as his contemporaries affectionately called him, pushed through Parliament in June of 1767 a number of revenue bills collectively known as "The Townshend Acts." These were designed to raise the necessary revenue to carry out the reorganization program in North America while at the same time conforming to the colonial distinction between internal and external taxes. That is, the Townshend Acts were import duties on selected goods brought into the colonies from Europe; such as glass, lead, paints, paper and tea. If the colonists wanted "external taxes" by Jove, old Champagne Charlie would give them external taxes.

In the preamble of the Acts, it was declared that the purpose of the measures was the "defraying (of) the charge of the administration of justice and the support of civil government" in America. In short, Townsend proposed to apply revenues to pay the Royal Governors and other colonial officials, thus releasing them from financial dependence on the Assemblies. The implication of the new taxes then was worse than the taxes themselves, for by going to this issue - the control of colonial assemblies over the Royal Governors and Judges - it struck at the foundation of power by the conservative element in the colonies.

John Dickinson, the principle conservative spokesman in the colonies, and the one who had originally made the nice distinction between external and internal taxes, was forced to retreat to a more extreme position. In a pamphlet entitled, "Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer", Dickinson proceeded to distinguish between external taxes for revenue and external taxes designed to regulate trade. The former, he now maintained were unconstitutional and hence beyond the power of Parliament to levy. Only a colonial assembly could levy taxes to raise revenue. Parliament was confined to levying taxes in order to regulate trade, e.g., The Sugar Act.

A rather caustic wit of Dickinson's logic suggested that what the good Pennsylvanian found objectionable was not Parliament's levying of taxes, but its attempt to collect those taxes. Through this argument once can see the attempt by colonial conservatives to avoid taxes while still paying lip service to Parliament's authority. But to no avail.

The Townshend Acts were greeted in the colonies by a boycott of British goods, nicely enforced by local "Sons of Liberty,"and a round of denunciations by the radicals, who increasingly relied upon tarring and feathering to "persuade" conservative opponents of the merit of their position. A well publicized instance of this occurred in Boston on January 25, 1774 when a club-wielding mob gathered along Cross street about 8:00 P.M., headed for the home of John Malcolm, a well-known and hot-tempered veteran of the French and Indian War, ex-overseas merchant, and currently Royal Customs official. His return to Boston in 1774 hade been preceded by reports that in 1771 he had assisted the North Carolina Governor against the Regulators and had already seized a brigantine suspected of smuggling.

Malcolm, forewarned was armed and ready and behind barred doors when the mob appeared. The mob outflanked this stout defender by raising ladders, breaking into an upstairs window and capturing their prey. Malcolm was dragged along King Street to the Custom's House where he was stripped "to buff and breech" and then tarred and feathered. He was then flogged and paraded around various streets with his neck in a halter. During this humiliation Malcolm was forced to drink tea to the King's health. Finally he was led to the gallows and with a noose around his neck ordered to curse the Royal Governor. Only after doing so was he deposited back at his home around midnight, half frozen, an arm dislocated and so severely bruised that between the frost and the tar he developed a skin infection that kept him house ridden until May, when he said for England, having retired as the custom official.

In the Massachusetts Great and General Court, radicals under Sam Adams's influence pushed through a resolution denouncing the Townshend acts as a violation of the principle of 'No taxation without Representation," reasserted the impossibility of being represented in the British Parliament and denounced the Crown for attempting to make the Royal Governor independent of the colonial assembly.

Massachusetts Governor Bernard unwisely ordered the resolution to be rescinded and when this was voted down, he just as promptly dissolved the assembly, giving the radicals a cause celebre.

There followed several outbreaks of violence and destruction of property, which triggered the arrival of redcoats into the principal ports in North America. And this in turn prompted further outbreaks of violence giving the radicals more ammunition.

On January 19, 1770 the "Battle of Golden Hill," as the radicals chose to call it erupted in the port of New York. This incident had its origins in the Quartering Act of 1765 which called upon the colonial assemblies to vote supplies for British troops in each of the colonies. In late December, 1769, the New York assembly, much to the disgust of the local radicals, had voted 2,000 Pounds for the quartering of British troops in the vicinity. Radicals had opposed "caving in" to Parliament's request, but the conservative dominated New York Assembly thought otherwise.

Immediately, Alexander McDougall, a leader of the local Sons of Liberty issued a pamphlet highly critical of the assembly. McDougall and his mob they proceeded to provoke the newly arrived British troops by words and actions. During one of these clashes a group of British troops cut down the town's Liberty Pole (a common symbol among the radicals) and moved to post a broadside on Golden Hill (a local geographical designation). This led to a riot in which some 30 to 40 soldiers, armed with bayonets, clashed with an equal number of Sons of Liberty, armed with cutlasses and clubs. McDougall was arrested by the colonial authorities, jailed and released on bail. He was never brought to trial however, owing to the death of the commonwealth's key witness.

Less than one month later another fracas erupted in Boston. Unlike the fight in New York, this was proved to be of propaganda

yvalue. In the lexicon of American nationalism, it is known as "The Boston Massacre." There, the radicals had sought a confrontation with local merchants. Throughout January and February, 1770, they had harassed those who refused to join the embargo against British goods. Signs had frequently been place on merchant's places of business, denouncing them. Most were innocuous enough, consisting of the single word "IMPORTERS" with a painted hand pointing directly to the place of business.

Small boys and street urchins had taken the opportunity to splatter mud and tar upon the shops of these merchants, but until February 22, no incident had erupted. But on that date, such a sign appeared in front of the business of one Theophilus Lillie. Across the street from Lillie lived a neighbor, Ebenezer Richardson. He attempted to remove the sign. That action diverted the attention of the street urchins, who began pelting Richardson with sticks and stones.

Richardson retreated to his house where the verbal exchange escalated and a crowd, now containing several adults, began to break the window panes of Richardson's home. He reacted by seizing a musket and opening fire upon the crow with a load of swanshot. One pellet went through the trousers of Robert Paterson, a sailor. Two others hit the nineteen year of son of John Gore. Eleven pellets entered the body of eleven year old Christopher Seider. Young Seider died as a result.

Presented with a windfall, Sam Adams quickly began to exact maximum propaganda value from the death of Seider. On February 26th, aided by heavy newspaper publicity, Adams staged a funeral billed as "the largest perhaps ever known in America." for the falled "Patriot." The size and solemnity of the funeral staged showed the ease and aptness with which Adams and the Sons of Liberty could transform an anonymous victim into a martyr. As it turned out, Seider's celebrated corpse had not bee four days in the ground when another incident occurred providing the radicals with more propaganda ammunition.

On March 2, Patrick Walker, a British private looking for off-duty work to supplement his pay, approached the shop of John Gray, a rope and cable maker, whose business depended on part-time labor. As he entered Grays place of business he was greeted by one of the ropemakers, William Green who yelled, "Soldier, do you want work?" "Yes, I do, faith." said Walker. "Well," said Green, then go and clean my shithouse."

Not surprisingly, fight ensued, with Walker getting the worst of it. Drubbed and humiliated Walker beat a hasty retreat to the barracks where he returned within the hour, reinforced by eight or nine other solders, including William Warren. The ropemakers called for assistance and once again a fight ensued, with the soldiers getting the worst of the melee. According to eye witnesses, a private by the name of Matthew Kilroy fought very well, as did Samuel Gray, a ropemaker.

By evening, work of the encounter had spread throughout most of Boston. Essentially, both sides regarded the matter as unsettled. Thus the following day, Saturday, Private John Carroll and two other soldiers tangled with a trio of ropemakers. Private John Rodgers ended up with a fractured skull and arm as a result. On Sunday, one of the ropemakers, believing that some of the soldiers were "Dogging" him, asked his room-mate, Benjamin Burdick, for assistance when a soldier was seen loitering around the premises. Burdick approached the soldier and asked him what he was doing. "I'm pumping shit," the soldier replied, whereupon Burdick thrashed him until the soldier ran.

On Monday evening, March 5, 1770, another scuffle broke out in the evening when Private Hugh White, on guard in front of the Custom House on the Boston Commons, took offense at some remarks directed his way by Edward Garrick, a young wigmaker's apprentice. Garrick was promptly cuffed on the side of his head by Private White and ran down the street crying. His cries attracted the attention of others and a crowd began to form. Then church bells began ringing. This sound, generally an alarm for fire, attracted more attention.

Private White gave the call for reinforcements. Captain Thomas Preston responded with a detail of guards consisting of Corporal William Wemms and Privates John Carroll, Matthew Kilroy, Seth Warren, Hugh Montgomery, James Hartigan and William McCauley. What happened next became the basis for the trial of Captain Preston on the charge of murder: Dead on the Boston Commons were Samuel Gray, who had acquitted himself so notably only two days earlier. Dead also was Michael Johnson, a ropemaker, with two bullets in his chest. Dead also was Crispus Attakus. Injured were Robert Paterson, the same whose trouser had been pierced with swanshot one week earlier at the Richardson residence. Also injured were Patrick Carr, Samuel Maverick, Edward Payne and Kit Monk.

Sam Adams lost no time. The next morning Adams and the "Sons of Liberty" were getting affidavits under notary seal, all of which attested to the "massacre," and depicted the incident as an unprovoked assault by the troops upon peaceful citizens. These were quickly circulated among the colonies, thus giving to the radicals another public relations victory. Paul Revere contributed to this propaganda barrage by engraving a plate depicting the incident which has become an icon for American nationalists.

Once again the colonial boycott had its impact. In January, 1770, Lord North became Prime Minister of Great Britain. He favored eliminating the Townshend duties to prevent the commercial boycott from widening. Parliament followed its leader and in April, 1770, caved in for the second time in three years to colonial pressure. The Townshend duties were repealed, with one exception: a three penny per pound tax on tea was maintained, not so much for the revenue, as to demonstrate the authority of Parliament.

Once again tension subsided. It ended on June 9, 1772 when a British customs schooner, the Gaspee, ran around just below Providence, Rhode Island while pursuing a local vessel suspected of smuggling. After nightfall, some eight boatloads of men from town, lead by a merchant named John Brown, rowed out to the Gaspee and set fire to the ship. The British authorities immediately established a board of inquiry which announced that those identified in the incident would be sent to England for trial, the obvious reason being their conviction that colonial juries would be less than impartial in trying one of their own.

Two sessions of the board of inquiry failed to turn up any tangible evidence. Witnesses summoned refused to cooperate and the Board adjourned. Nevertheless, the proposal to try the cases in England rather than in the colony, alarmed even the conservative merchants in the colonies, who realized their extensive smuggling operations would be threatened by such a policy.

Using the Gaspee incident as a pretext (the motive of the burning was not political, but that of revenge) Sam Adams pushed through the Boston Town Meeting a resolution urging every massachusetts community to appoint "committees of correspondence" to exchange information and coordinate measures to defend "colonial rights." A similar proposal was made in Virginia by Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and Richard Henry Lee. Within a year, every colony except Pennsylvania had followed suit. By 1774, the radicals were lined by a communication web and the infrastructure for a new government. These "committees" increasingly functioned as alternatives to the legally established institutions of Royal Government.

Even more threatening to the conservative position was the announcement shortly after the Gaspee incident by Governor Thomas Hutchinson, that he would be receiving his salary direct from the Crown rather than from the Great and General Court. Several months later, a similar announcement was made relative to all Massachusetts judges. Thus the executive and judiciary were rendered virtually independent of the control of the conservative dominated colonial assembly in that colony.

THE TEA CRISIS

The final incident that provoked the crisis renting colonial relations with Britain came from an unassuming quarter. The background of the "tea crisis" of 1773 lay, not in the tea tax, which as we have seen was part of the Townshend duties of 1767 and had been both regularly enforced and collected since the repeal of the other duties in 1770. Rather, the background of this little crisis lay in the tangled affairs of the famous British East India Company. By 1770, that corporation was on the verge of bankruptcy. In part, that financial distress was due to the ability of American colonists to smuggle Dutch tea, which not only reduced the revenue of the British government, but virtually negated the monopoly on tea which the British East India Company enjoyed.

The bankruptcy of the British East India Company had enormous consequences for Parliament. By virtue of its unsupervised operation, the company was not the only viable government in the subcontinent of India. It's default would place tremendous indirect costs on Britain who would be responsible for substituting its authority for that of the company should the latter fail. After weighing this alternative, Parliament elected to bail the company out of its financial difficulties. The result was the Tea Act of May, 1773, designed to salvage the Company.

First in the bail out came the renunciation by Parliament of some 400,000 Pounds in back taxes. Next came a loan of 1,400,000 Pounds. Finally came a grant to the company to export tea direct to the colonies without the requirement of trans-shipment through an English port.

The net effect of this latter concession was to put the Company in an excellent competitive position in the colonies. Even with a three penny-per-pound tax, the Company concluded it would be able to undersell smuggled Dutch tea and capture the entire North American market. Based upon that new position, the Company announced its intent of by-passing colonial merchants and marketing Company products through hand-picked retailers known as "consignees." In the colonies, local merchants recognized the implications. Not only would the profits from tea by pass them but so would the profit from other commodities under the control of the British East India company: wines, spices, silks, etc.

Once again, conservative and radical groups in the colonies united to boycott the British East India Company. A boycott of Company products was proclaimed and local consignees were intimidated into resigning in most ports. In Philadelphia, a "Committee for Tarring and Feathering" warned harbor pilots not to guide ships carrying teach into port. This tactic however failed in Boston, where consignees and others were protected by the British army. Thus direct action in Boston was applied.

On the evening of December 16, 1773, the Mohawks struck. Some 150 men, guided by the invisible hand of Sam Adams, boarded three ships in Boston harbor and dumped the offending leaves into the water, allegedly to signify their indignation with a tax that had been regularly collected without incident since 1768. That the incident was not only premeditated but provocative is clear. Massachusetts governor Hutchinson, fearing such an incident, had taken advantage of a seldom used local ordinance and ordered the ships out of harbor. Rather than forestalling an incident, Hutchinson inadvertently contributed to it by hastening the action of the Boston "Sons of Liberty."

Sam Adams wanted an incident He succeeded in provoking it. The British ministry of Lord North overreacted. Given a more pragmatic response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament might have undermined the radical's position; for there was a sizeable body of conservative opinion in the colonies criticizing that event, especially colonial merchants. But the reaction of the British Parliament was otherwise. The destruction of property - and tea at that - aroused John Bull more than the frequent mobbing of its officials or the beatings administered to its soldiers. The ministry of Lord North regarded the action as a test of its will. It therefore pushed through Parliament a series of punitive measures, dubbed by the colonists as The Intolerable Acts.

The most important of these was the Boston Port Bill, which closed the port of Boston until the citizens reimbursed the East India Company for damages, compensated the revenue officers for taxes lost, and gave the Crown evidence of their good future intentions. The Second, the Massachusetts Government Act, was under consideration by Parliament long before the tea party. It reformed the colonial government by giving the Royal Governor power to appoint judges and sheriffs and made membership in the Council appointive by the Crown for life. The third: The Administration of Justice Act, provided for trial in England of certain charges. The fourth: The Quartering Act, again provided for the garrisoning of troops.

One final act that was passed by Parliament at this time, and associated by the colonists with the Intolerable Acts, was the Quebec Act. This long delayed bill was the logical conclusion reached by the Plan of 1764, which had been postponed because of Parliaments apprehension of the public reaction. The Act officially recognized Roman Catholicism as Quebec's religion, established civil government in that area, gave to its citizens a monopoly on the fur trade and created a vast Indian reservation west of the Appalachian mountains.

Radicals throughout the colonies attributed the worst possible motives to these enactments. They alleged that the Crown intended to first starve Boston into submission and then crush all dissent through rigged trials, guaranteed by the appointment of corrupt judges and sheriffs. The Quartering Act, radicals said was designed to ensure repression in the event of protest or opposition, and the Administration of Justice Act was called "The Murder Act" designed to encourage massacres by preventing local juries from convicting future solders who killed civilians.

From the perspective of the 20th century, it is difficult to realize that the greatest reaction in the colonies was directed against The Quebec Act. By establishing the legitimacy of Catholicism, Parliament ensured that every Puritan minister in the colonies became a reluctant Pilgrim. Now, not only radicals, but died-in-the-wool clergyman united in proclaiming that Crown and Parliament had united to throw off against the disaffected Protestant colonies a "hoard of Popish slaves" who would thereafter assist the Catholic clergy in establishing a "universal despotism in the British Empire."

Again, it is difficult for the 20th century student to appreciate this reaction, forgetful as we are of the tremendous ideological gap that existed between religious groups in the 18th century. But perhaps the student can understand that the only significant difference between "Puritans" and "Pilgrims" was that the former had separated themselves de jure facto from the Church of England, with the King as its head, while the Puritans had only separated themselves de facto from the Anglican Church. After the passage of the Quebec Act, multitudes of Puritans came to the conclusion that only a formal separation from the Church of England could ensure the future salvation of their souls.

THE FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

It was against the background of an emotionally charged atmosphere occasioned by the passage of the Intolerable Acts that the last chapter in the contest for power between radicals and conservatives was held. Responding to a circular letter issued by the Boston Committee of Correspondence, delegates from 11 colonies assembled in Philadelphia to discuss a unified response to the Intolerable Acts.

Writing to a friend shortly before leaving Virginia to attend the convention, George Washington, not without irony, wrote

the crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights,

or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon

us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject

slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.

The meeting Washington and others attended has been named The First Continental Congress.

The conservative position in the congress was stated by Joseph Galloway in a memorandum which bears his name - The Galloway Plan. Basically it called for no fundamental internal change in colonial government which means, had it been adopted, it would have left the conservative elements within the colonies in power. It called for a Grand Council - a colonial legislature on a national scale - whose members would be elected by colonial assemblies, hence by conservatives. The President of the Grand Council was to be appointed by the King and have an absolute veto power over all bills passed by that body.

The conservative "catch" was that all acts passed by Parliament impacting on the colonies were to be confirmed by the Grand Council, thus giving representatives of the conservative dominated assemblies the veto over future taxes. Thus the Galloway Plan would have left control within the colonies in the hands of merchants and planters.

The radical position was presented in the Suffolk Resolves, so named after the Massachusetts town were it originated. These began with a statement that no obedience should be paid to the Intolerable Acts. Further, it recommended that taxes should be paid, not to the colonial assemblies, but to extra-legal bodies (i.e, committees of correspondence) until royal government had been "placed upon a constitutional foundation." Finally, the Suffolk Resolves urged that military preparations be made against the danger of a British attack against Boston.

At this interesting juncture in history, with the delegates to the First Continental Congress debating the merits of the Galloway Plan and the Suffolk Resolves, an interesting development occurred. News arrived in Philadelphia from Boston - the "Powder Alarm" - of yet another horrible massacre of honest citizens by British troops, a veritable second "Boston Massacre."

On October 8, 1773, delegates to the First Continental Congress endorsed the Suffolk Resolves and followed this by voting again for commercial non-importation, non-exportation with Britain. Notable also is the fact that the delegates voted to endorse extra-legal machinery for enforcement of the embargo. Finally, the Congress voted on the Galloway Plan. It was defeated - by one vote.

Oh Yes! The Powder Alarm! Well, it proved to be just one of those false rumors that frequently circulate for reasons that historians can never prove, but can only speculate about.

LEXINGTON AND CONCORD

The conservative cause was not completely lost after the First Continental congress. The middle colonies of New York and Pennsylvania cam close to repudiating the position of the First Continental Congress and renouncing the Suffolk Resolves. The colony of Georgia actually did.

And the conservatives were not without their allies in Britain. The great English parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, had long been a supporter of the official colonial position on the basis of well tested conservative principles which were to make the name of Edmund Burke synonymous with Conservatism in later years. William Pitt, the most prominent of British Prime Minister in the mid-18th century also favored accommodation - a hall mark of conservative thought. Pitt proposed in 1775 that British troops be withdrawn from the colonies and proposed a reliance upon the requisition system to achieve the Plan of 1764.

Nor was Lord North, British Prime Minister at the time, opposed to compromise. Eventually, Lord North was to repudiate the idea of direct taxation of colonists by the fact-saving device of denying in 1775 any intent of drawing "a considerable revenue" from them. He too offered the compromise of returning to the requisition system. To which offer modern historians must ask, what did the role of taxation play in the revolution?

Unfortunately for the offer of Lord North's Conciliatory Proposal, it arrived in the colonies on April 20, 1775. Two days earlier, British troops under the command of General Gage, and commanded by Major John Pitcaron, had moved out of Boston heading west in search of powder and arms which intelligence had revealed was being stored by; radicals at the frontier towns of Lexington and Concord.

The radicals were forewarned of the British military initiative, by the dispatch of "The Patriot Express", Paul Revere. The result was a fatal wound for the conservative cause. "The shot heard round the world," as it has been poetically called, was heard in all the colonies. The radicals, in control of the colonial post, saw that their version of the engagement was heard. A batch of the radical version was sent to Benjamin Franklin in London, with instructions that copies were to be sent to every town in England, the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and members of the Common Council of London and other British dignitaries.

General Gage in Massachusetts accused the radicals of stopping the posts, breaking open the mails, and removing documents in order to prevent the British account of the battles from circulating. How well they succeeded is reflected in the fact that the radical version of the skirmishes arrived in North Carolina some two months before the British version. The delay was fatal for the conservative cause. In the Virginia Assembly, a few die-hard planters could still speak of moderation, but the radical Patrick Henry's rejoinder was irresistible:

It is in vain sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen

may cry "Peace, peace," but there is no peace...

Our brethren are already in the field

The radical tactics had succeeded in splitting the ranks of the conservatives. They now had only one choice left. To acknowledge the authority of Parliament and call upon that body to support them against the revolution, the path taken by those called "Loyalists" or "Tories", or to come over to the radical cause. The decision was difficult. To take the former course meant loosing all, one's property, position and perhaps one's life at the hands of the radicals. To take the latter course risked losing all at the hands of the British forces soon to arrive to suppress the sedition in the colonies. Many conservatives now recognized the meaning behind John Harrington's famous quip:

Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason?

Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Many conservatives continued to avoid a decision by maintaining the fiction that they could oppose Parliament while supporting the Crown. Thus we find George Washington as head of the Continental Forces leading colonial troops in battle against the British by day and toasting the health of the King at officer's mess in the evening. But eventually the contradiction proved too much for even the staid and conservative G. Washington. He came over.

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Footnote

Robert Marquand, "Colonial sermons laid groundwork for the Revolution."

For a hundred years, American students have been taught that the Fourth of July and the American Revolution were mainly political and economic events - triumphs of the secular forces of rationalism in human history.

But don't expect to be given that view in Harry Stout's class.

Dr. Stout is a professor at Yale University and one of the leaders of a quietly growing number of scholars who, using a new blend of intellectual and social history, have begun to find a religious consciousness and motive at the center of the American Revolution.

For Stout - whose nine-year study of some 2,000 scattered, unpublished colonial sermons gained him a Pulitzer Prize nomination this year - the new scholarship is a restorative enterprise. It rejects the standard idea that the Revolution was primarily a product of the Enlightenment, and that religion had died as an active force in the Colonies by the 1700s.

Instead, the "new religious history" - as one scholar calls it - sees the colonial revolt as an outflow of fervent religious debate that had been bubbling in colonial churches for decades. If the Revolution "began in the minds of the people," as founder John Adams put it, then those minds were imbued with a complex understanding of biblical history and metaphor, and of the struggle of oppressed peoples for liberty, these scholars say.

Stout's work is not based on a literary survey. He visited old churches in New England - digging up early sermon notes, ministers' diaries, handwritten manuscripts of church meetings, and other documents never before studied as a group.

He also studied the communication of ideas in the Colonies. In the 17th and 18th centuries, America was a wilderness. There were few roads, no national postal system. Most of the population lived in villages untouched by newspapers or print media. The only books most colonists owned were the Bible ad a few almanacs, Stout found.

"Yet these were the most literate people in the history of the world," he said in a recent interview. "You wonder: 'Where do they get their ideas of self, of society, of corporate purpose - of what they are placed in the world to do?'"

His answer: the sermon. In colonial America, Stout says, the sermon was a message of extraordinary power. The average New Englander heard 7,000 sermons in a lifetime, about 15,000 hours of concentrated listening. There were no competing voices. It was a medium more influential than TV is today, he says.

Nor, Stout adds, had the tough-minded piety of Calvinism relaxed into a pallid outward morality in the sermons and religious life of the 18th century - currently, the accepted view. In the villages, ministers continued to preach the need for deep self-examination, redemption, rebirth, and freedom from sin.

Further, the colonial ministers - the grass-roots leaders of the Revolution, according to Stout - closely identified the events leading to 1776 with the ongoing drama of God's church and the fulfillment of a mission going back to the declaration of Puritan founder William Bradford: "We are the Lord's free people."

In this drama, Stout says, constitutional rights and political liberties were of secondary importance in the revolt against England. Of prime importance was the issue of spiritual destiny.

"In revolutionary New England," Stout writes, "ministers continued to monopolize public communications, and the terms they most often employed to justify resistance and to instill hope emanated from the Scriptures and from New England's enduring identity as an embattled people of the Word who were commissioned to uphold a sacred and exclusive covenant between themselves and God."

Stout's book is titled "The New england Soul." But he is careful to say that colonial America wasn't New England writ large. For a time, the middle Colonies and the South were ignored by historians, he notes; recent scholarship has changed that. Still, New England had an inordinate influence in the colonial era.

Issues of power and authority, of spirit and law, were debated with solemn intensity in Congregational churches - attended by 70 percent of New Englanders. What was genuine conversion? Was it necessary for church membership? How would Psalms be sung? Could they come from sources other than the Bible? How were new parishes to be formed? What were their rights, their tax bases?

New York University Prof. Patricia Bonomi comments: "The attention to fine matters of theology that most of us would care less about today - the passion, the brilliance - was the same quality of mind that would soon create the Constitution."

The new twist was the active role of church members: "Congregationalism, by its very nature, grants sovereign power to no one," Stout says. "So we find people in New england in these churches playing democratic politics from the start, without ever calling it that. As a matter of fact, I think if you were to stop the average New Englander in the early 18th century and mention the word politics, they would know that word, but would think instinctively of church politics."

Outside a scholarly circle, these views are news to the 20th century. Stout and others say popular history isn't accurate.

Says David Hall, a historian at Boston University: "There is a religious continuity in American history through the Revolution, and it's important to know that. We exaggerate the religion of the 17th century Puritans today, and devalue the religion of the Revolution. The uprising was not just about taxes and land."

Even the classic deist-rationalist - Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin - believed in afterlife, says Dr. Bonomi.

It's all news to Stout's undergraduates. It doesn't fit with the history they have been taught. Students think the Revolution was a struggle for freedom, equality, and "a way to make lots of money," Stout says. "They find it curious that the colonists thought about it in terms of concepts like sin, virtue, and redemption."

In class, Stout bridges the gap through popular music - the songs of Bruce Springsteen in particular. "Bruce is disillusioned, because he's been brought up to think there is a promised land. But he doesn't find it in the factories, or in the streets of fire." What Stout asks his students is: Where did Springsteen ever get the idea that there is a promised land?

"The question I keep asking students is: 'What does America mean to you? Where do we get our ideas? " he says.

Stout, who holds a joint appointment in the Yale Divinity School and history department, is an easy-spoken native of Philadelphia - a baby-boomer who took seriously the idealism of his own generation. Ironically, his first teaching job was at Kent State University in 1970 - he arrived on campus three days after the National Guard shot four students. ("There were tanks on campus... I met the chairman of the history department in a grammar-school parking lot.")

He took up history after reading the great Harvard Prof. Perry Miller's "Errand Into the Wilderness." It helped sort out American ideals and myths. Today Stout worries about "zealots" who confuse American nationalism with religion.

For now, experts say the field of religious studies in American history is growing. New work is being done on colonial schooling, for example. (Puritan children knew more about the history of Israel than of England, Stout says.)

Rev. Charles Hambrick-Stowe's recent study of religious confessions of lay people is receiving more attention, as is a work by Brandeis University Prof. Christine Leight Heyrman on the communities of Marblehead and Gloucester, Mass., and Bonomi's recent "Under the Cope of Heaven" about the vitality and contribution of Anabaptists, Quakers, Lutherans, and others during the Revolution.

Says Bonomi: "The field is developing rapidly. We talk about it with each other. But somebody has to say we've broken into a whole new territory."

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