I: Sheeps and Goats - The European States and their Citizenry since the 14th Century:
Introduction: Vassals, Citizens and Inhabitants:
The main difference between the Old Feudal Realm, the Early Modern State and the Modern State is that while the former had no citizens, the latter had a mixture of vassals, inhabitants and citizens and the last, at least theoretically, only citizens and those of foreign states temporarily hosted within it.
In the Old Feudal Order, almost every man was someone's vassal.
Some had the distinction of also being lords; the King alone, but not always, had no master and was therefore subject to the judgment of God alone. To the rest, the Law, so to speak, did not apply and the Crown did not have a direct relationship with them. The Law was merely the standing instructions that the king or a lower lord would have given his vassals; naturally, they diverged depending on their relationship with him.
The Citizenry lives, on the other hand, by the law of the State, and bears direct relationship to it. They do not serve an intermediate lord, but themselves bear duties towards the State and are, consequently, entitled to certain expectation from it.
The early Modern State, unlike that of our own time, admitted the existence of vassals within its realm, since it did not fully emerge yet from the Feudal Order; at the same time its grand project was the building up of the Citizenry as its true body politic. These citizens were extracted from the Feudal arrangement and given new place within the State - but some continued to be lords for some time.
But the State did not extract only Citizens out of the body of the Feudal Order but also a group we may call Inhabitants or Populace.
These were people living on the State's territory, administered and ruled by its officers directly, who nevertheless were not subject to any regular law - or at least no law they could interact with or comprehend. To them the Rule of the State came down like Zeus' lightning bolt, arbitrary and willful and irresistible.
At best they could hope to petition as high or as immediate officer of the State as they could reach; but no law, not even that of honoring his promises bound such an officer in his relationship with them.
Such inhabitants could be organized in rural communes, in their religious congregation or any other arrangement - but these organizations, unlike those of the Citizenry, were not protected by Law and could be ruptured and uprooted at any moment. Even if they were assigned to the care and exploitation of a master, they have gotten only one side of the bargain - he was free to exploit them, but couldn't protect them, even in his own best interest, since they never ceased to be the subjects of the State, of which he was a mere beneficiary.
The advent of the State between the 14th and the 18th century have been the extraction and sorting of all former vassals from under the Feudal Order and into either of these two groups.
The 19th and 20th century can therefore be described as the time period in which whole countries had shifted to consist entirely either of citizens or of inhabitants. But while all these changes were internal, they were set in motion by, and in their turn set in motion, external developments.
1: the post-Crusade Marginal Expansion of Latin Christianity and Internal Contraction of European Identity:
The Crusades, that great enterprise Latin Christianity undertook between the 11th and the 13th century for the expressed purpose of securing the Holy Land for the Western Church, ended in terrible failure.
Not only was the last bastion on the Judaean coast lost with the fall of Acre, the last success of the Fourth Crusade had achieved the opposite goal- it shattered the Byzantine Empire, The Bastion of Christendom.
The Byzantine crisis paved the way to the rise of the Ottomans who would proceed, in the course of the next four centuries to expand northwards and westwards, threatening the Catholic World's southeastern flank, twice besieging the very Imperial capital of Vienna.
Nevertheless, between the start, in earnest, of the Spanish Reconquista and the American Declaration of Independence, the reach, scope and numbers of Catholics - and those Christians who split from the Catholic Church - increased greatly, with new lands brought under the cross and the plough, which would eventually allow them to reverse the dangers and misfortunes that were caused by the failure of the Crusades.
At the same time, within the old heartland of Western Europe, Society have been in turmoil and shift - the definition of the Church had split between polities, and the relationship between it and the emerging State had shifted in each country.
The burgeoning State had chosen for itself a constituency to serve as its citizenry from the diverse subjects of the old feudal order. The criteria to this selections was not consistent, albeit they often justified themselves on the basis of class, religion or ethnicity- they reflected the long political processes, not some grand plan of some malevolent force.
In turn, these processes led to the rise of a new civilization across the Atlantic Ocean, while the borderlands of Latin Christendom declined and collapsed. The New World, and its new religious order, had gained from the errors and destruction of the Old.
Since we have examined already the development of the relationships between Church and the budding Western European State, it would be helpful to have a look into three regions where different paths was taken: The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, Italy and Spain.
A: The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth:
The Eagle and the Horseman: the Dual Feudalisms of the Commonwealth
With the 11385 conversion of Jogaila, Duke of the Lithuanians, in the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, the last major Pagan realm in Europe have been brought into the Christian fold.
With this act, and the marriage of Jogaila (or Wladyslaw II Jagiełło) to Queen Jadwiga of Poland, the Lithuanians and Poles were joined in a personal union of Monarch, which would, at the passing of the last king of this dynasty, evolve into a single polity - The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Poland came late to Feudalism, just as Lithuania came late to Christianity but as it adopted it, it jumped directly to the Aristocratic Republic model which is Feudalism's logical conclusion.
Poland had, at its inception, a class of free peasants who worked their own land. But as the Nobility monopolized the regional assemblies, the sejmiks, and then the national one, the Sejm, a feudal system of decentralized estates developed, where the peasants were reduce first to dependence, and then to outright serfdom, which soon devolved into slavery in all but name.
This abuse was, in and of by itself, a retreat of the State from the majority of its territory and population into the cities and, in the countryside, the governing of relationships within the nobility.
The Szlachta as it was termed, constituted a larger proportion of the population than in any other country, but never a majority (they would never reach 10%). The peasantry on the other constituted the majority of the population. A Polish magnate thus could spend most of his time on his estate, amongst his peasants who were not protected by or subjects to the Commonwealth and its laws. Even when meeting with other nobles of his neighborhood, their relationships for the most part would be governed by aristocratic etiquette rather than Law. Only in the semjik, when official suits, appointments and elections are discussed, the Law would have a significant role. Thus, for a rustic magnate, the most politically active class of the Commonwealth, the Law ceases to be something which is observed daily, and with the Law, the State disappears from the mind, but as a thing that can be used to advance one's wealth and standing in society.
But besides the Szlachta another order of privileged warriors was recognized, the culturally Ruthenian, Slavonic Orthodox Cossack Hosts of the southeastern marches.
The Cossacks, while being subjects of the Polish-Lithuanian Crown, acted sometimes they were autonomous entities. The vast Ruthenian lands brought into the Union by the Duchy of Lithuania had, nevertheless, complicated matters - here was a large population sharing language, religious affiliation and even family ties with the Cossacks, to which many Ruthenian peasants as well as down on their luck noblemen and townsfolk would often defect. This made the forging the Union into a single nation difficult. The Cossack were comparable to a magnet, constantly drawing away the Ruthenian-Orthodox elements in Commonwealth society away from the State and towards them and the Orthodox state of Muscovy in the East. They also were likely to oppose, violently, any attempt to bridge religious and cultural gaps between Poles and Ruthenians, Catholics and Orthodox. They often were involved in the organization of riots and pogroms.
The Polish State made great attempt to draw the Cossack elites itself and break the power of the semi official sich or armed encampments of the Cossacks. Registered Cossack armies were raised, with colonels appointed by the Crown besides the Cossack elders, and the nobility of many leading Cossack families was recognized - opening a door for them into the Szlachta and Commonwealth politics writ large. While most refused to participate in it by choice even Bohdan Khmelnitsky made the claim of being a Szlachcic - and his enemies sought to embarrass him by denying this fact.
The great civil war of the 17th century, the Cossack revolt, had had a religious element, but in fact was a contest between these two warrior castes - the Ruthenian, Orthodox, treaty-bound Cossack hosts seeking separation from the Commonwealth and association with Muscovy against the Polish-Lithuanian, mostly Catholic Szlachta and the Jews, which were conceived by the Cossacks as allies of the Poles.
The idea that Chmielnicki Cossacks were even marginally interested in the plight of the peasantry is pure fantasy. They have aligned themselves - and delivered the Ruthenian peasantry bound-hand-and-foot - to the Muscovite Czardom, the most regressive, brutish successor to the Mongol slaving horde that ever disgraced the face of the Earth. The status of the peasants did not improve one iota, and was never intended to.
Polish-Catholic peasants, as well as Jews, were raped, plundered and murdered just the same - often carried to slavery in the Cossacks lands.
Gogol's Taras Bulba is a magnificent piece of Russian propaganda - and sets up the tone of this literary genre - portraying the horrific inhumanity of Muscovy's allies as healthy, natural and unrestrained passion - and dehumanizing its victims. As we have seen, the Cossacks and their leaders were far from simple noble savages- they were shrewd, sophisticated politicians who were well aware of the conditions of both Commonwealth and international politics and could manipulate them to suit the peculiar needs of their class. A much better portrayal of the events and Commonwealth society is Bashevis-Singer's The Captive). Due to the cossacks' practice of mutilating and destroying the bodies as well as carrying away both male and female captives, survivors were often asked by Jewish courts to compile from memory lists of the dead - such as the one shown above.
Nor were the Cossacks brave defender of the Eastern Orthodox faith - as we have seen, the Uniate church was an organic internal movement within the autocephalic Ruthenian Orthodox church, which the Cossacks opposed since it would deliver the loyalties urban Orthodoxy to the side of the Commonwealth State and would limit the Cossack hosts' influence. They did not shy from allying themselves with the Tatar hordes of Crimea - which have been prone to kidnap Ruthenians, Jews and Poles alike and sell them in the slave markets of Constantinople - the opposition to which became the material to much propaganda.
That being said - the personal ambition and inflated self-image of Chmielnicki (who now proclaimed himself the Prince of Rus) did create the first (and short lived) Ruthenian state since the fall of Kyivan Rus. In the new state, constructed first by Tatar-Ottoman support and than as a Muscovite protectorate, the peasants' status was marginally improved - as they were still under the obligation of seasonal forced labor, but no longer, officially, serfs.
The Tripartite Polish Church
The Polish Church always had a unique place in the Polish State, and later in the Commonwealth.
It was the Dukes of Poland who had sponsored the baptism of the Poles in 925, and the grand bargain struck in 1025, that had elevated the Piasts to Kings of Poland also created three Polish archbishoprics, which have created an autonomous Polish church body. The Polish kings had fostered the buildings of churches in royal castles (the outposts of their power) and under their Castellans which would eventually be transformed into the Polish Szlachta, to the degree that the Polish word for a church, Kościół, is borrowed from either the Czech Kostel or the German Kastel.
However, due to its position (and expansion by conquest and unification with the Duchy of Lithuania) on the margins of Latin Christendom, the Commonwealth had under its rule great number of non-Catholic Christians and Jews.
These were never understood to be part of the citizenry proper of the Commonwealth. The Eastern Orthodox peasants were bound to their lords just like their Catholic brethren. Szlachcics did not lose their status due to their Orthodox religion or Ruthenian extraction. Class distinctions divided the Commonwealth's population, but its privileges also bridged religious a ethnic ones.
The Church had a great deal of influence, direct as well as indirect, on Polish society and politics. It even had, until 1565, judicial privileges. The Reformation, which came to Poland not as an artificially imported religion embraced by the State, but naturally, with Hussite, Lutheran and Calvinist ideas making their way through the Polish population and lower clergy, had weakened the Catholic Church's position. The State sought a solution that would have replicated the relationship it had with the Catholic Church, but with less than ideal results.
The Union of Brest was intended to unite all the various Protestant groups (none of which have been strong enough to stand on its own) under one organization, parallel to the Catholic hierarchy. Poland alone avoided a war of religion between Catholics and Protestants. Some steps were made to create a Polish national Church on the Anglican model, which could contain within it Protestants and Catholics alike, but beyond Polonization - that is, granting of greater autonomy to Polish prelates and officially sanctioning local customs - it did not materialize. The counter-reformation saw most of non-Baltic Poland reverting to Catholicism.
A similar movement aimed at the Orthodox faithful was more successful.
The Uniate or Greek Catholic Church, which incorporated the Byzantine Rite, Church Slavonic liturgy and Orthodox hierarchy with submission to Papal supremacy, was intended from the beginning to mend the greatest religious divide in the Commonwealth's population, as well as alleviate concerns regarding the influence of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, which have fallen under the rule of the Ottomans.
This movement, and the opposition to it, were not entirely spontaneous - Uniate archbishops, sponsored and empowered by the Commonwealth State, competed within the Ruthenian Orthodox structure within which they rose against the opponents of union, sponsored by the Cossack hosts. The swing in the relative power of the two Orthodox factions between periods and districts could be sharp - as the career of Archbishop Josaphat Kuntsevych of Polotsk proves - after failing to arrest a Disuniate priest, the Prelate had been attacked by an angry mob and killed.
Nevertheless, neither of these movements was an artificial creation - both sides had genuine adherents - Uniates who sincerely wished for the end of the Great Schism and saw the new church as an important bridge between the twin great Roman churches, and their opponents who without affectation were truly concerned of the theological implication of submission to Rome. The fact that both churches had survived to this day testify to this truth. Indeed, without true mass of honest faithful, no church body would have been of much use to the State or its opponents. Within this framework, if Uniate Bishops punished Disuniate priests, they did so as part of the authority which they exercised within the bounds of their Orthodox diocese.
The Four Lands - Jews in the Commonwealth
The Jews maintained their own Va'âd Arbâ Àratzoth - The Congress of Four Lands, which have met during the yearly great market held in Danzig and made various general regulations. The Jews lived under their own laws and political organizations (after the model discussed before), and were subjected to the authority of the State- but not its citizens. They were expected to pay their taxes and assist in the defense of the Commonwealth in their particular cities and settlements.
The Commonwealth had vacillated in its treatment of the Jews and their organizations.
The authorities of the Congress were expanded or reduced, its sessions interrupted, the rights and privileges of its members and those it protected altered, restructured or abolished on a regular basis. The Jews of Poland lived in relative safety and orderliness, compared to their brethren in other realms, due to this official recognition of their central communal body, and their residence being established in law- but they had no true security as for their status.
Furthermore, the increased religious and ethnic tensions between the parallel orders of Polish nobility, clergy (Roman or Greek Uniate Catholic or Brest Unionist) and the Ruthenian one (Cossacks and Disuniate Orthodoxy), meant that the State was increasingly incapable to protect even those it wished to, from mob attacks and internal armed conflict. Both sides collaborated with external enemies to aid them in these. Thus the Jews could not trust the State to protect them - and so they, and the peasants, grew dependent on the armed magnate class - Poles and Cossacks alike.
Conclusion: Strong Nations, a Weak Union.
On May 3rd 1791, the Sejm of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had adapted a new constitution that, amongst other liberal, sensible and high-minded measures, had officially established more humane legislature to regulate Serfdom.
By that time, the Commonwealth have been a Russian protectorate since 1764, its king, Stanislaw Poniatowski, have been elected due to the influence of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, his former lover. Its lands have been partitioned already, each time another piece fed to the hungry maw of a stronger, more energetic state. The Cossack lands (and most of its Orthodox subjects) were already understood to be wards and allies of the Czars since the Ruin - the collapse of the embryonic Cossack Rus established by Chmielnicki. It is telling the in the Great Northern War, which have started 1700 - no more than 43 years after the end of the Cossack Revolt - the citizens of the Commonwealth were fighting on both sides, on lands that were former possessions of their State.
Within 5 years of the adaption of the new constitution, the Commonwealth would be completely dismembered.
The effects of this dismemberment were sharp and immediately felt. Men who had for centuries being accustomed to a voice in their own government were subjected to the authority of provincial, sometimes even martial, administrators, representatives of their old enemies. Some argue that there was not much difference, or that all change was for the better, since the weakened Commonwealth was yielding to foreign pressures for decades at that point. I only wish those judicious realists never experience the difference of turning from a citizen of a weakened and degraded state to the conquered subject of a voracious and military empire.
At the end, the Commonwealth could maintain itself only as long as it faced no serious competition for the loyalties of its citizens. While the Holy Roman Empire was busy in its internal squabbles, while the Russian principalities were weak tributaries of the Golden Horde, while Scandinavia was a fractious union rather than the home to two coherent, hungry nations.
The Commonwealth was made up of various groups that were all incredibly proud and sensitive of their identities. They may have wished, at various points, to be part of the Commonwealth, but only on their own terms, if they can enjoy special privileges within it. The internal cohesion of the Poles and that of Lithuania proper was and remained strong to this day, the aspiration for an effective and Western-oriented polity sustaining these peoples through hardships and occupation. But the Commonwealth was powerless to contain and subject those aspirations and the ambition of the Cossacks in a wider Union.
B. The Borderlands: Italy and Spain.
In the Commonwealth, a single society identified with the State failed to crystalize and unite the populace of its territory. External influences neutering any attempt to forge unifying institutions.
In the southern marginal peninsulas of Western Europe, however, the opposite had happened - while an identifiable common culture was forged by a unifying state or emerged from the conditions of the land, it was not sufficient to create an effective state. The denizens of these lands found themselves split either between competing states or between rival institutions of the same state, whose relative power was always, simultaneously, in flux and at a stalemate that ruined Society's ability to achieve stable and orderly life.
The cultural disunity of Italy is overstated. Italians, despite their differences, had a sense of distinction and even of cultural superiority over their transalpine neighbors. They shared a language, which, at least since the days of Petrarch and Dante, had a recognized literary form which was used for official and private business, not only for literature. People inside and out of the peninsula had a sense of Italians being distinct from Frenchmen, Germans and Greeks - all definite cultures with close contacts with the Italian states.
Only insular Sicily (as opposed to the continental portion of the Kingdom of the two Sicilies - also known as the Kingdom of Naples) and Piedmont were considered somewhat alien to the rest of the peninsula (Piedmont was too French, Sicily too Greek) and their joining to the unified Italian State (especially of Piedmont at the head of the union) was a controversial mood, which was at the end only accepted as a bargain.
This identity was forcefully divorced from politics by the War of the League of Cambrai.
The early 16th century French intervention in Italian politics destroyed the civic culture of the Italian renaissance and crushed any aspiration for unification either by aggrandizement of an Italian state or by the assertion of Italy as a unified organ in the body of the Holy Roman Empire. Italians can therefore be construed from now on as one people with many states, just as the Commonwealth have been one state with multiple peoples.
The Church in Italy existed in a unique state: While Catholicism, or the outright devotion for it, was strong everywhere in Italy, with cities celebrating saints, conducting sacred procession and races and so forth, the Church have been, outside the direct possessions of the Papacy, extremely weak as a political force.
The Spanish Crown and its European Dominions
The weakness of the Italian states led to domination by foreign powers which assumed de facto -and sometimes de jure - overlordship of parts of the Italian peninsula.
One of the most interesting cases is that of the Spanish possessions in Italy. At a certain point, the Crown of Spain came to possess both the entirety of Italy south of Naples as well as the Duchy of Milan in the far Northwest. The former came to the Spaniard's hands by the succession of the Crown of Aragon which have inherited the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in the early 15th Century. The latter was originally a state of the Holy Roman Empire, which the complex nature of Habsburg inheritance arrangements had given to the Spanish branch of the family in 1556. Until the 19th Century, the Spanish forces stationed in Italy have been essential to assisting the Austrian branch in European conflicts, assuring their continuous hold on the Imperial throne.
Italy was not the only European province of Habsburg Spain. It fell to the Spanish Habsburgs to administer the Low Countries, the best and richest part of the Burgundian inheritance. Charles V, who as both heir to the Dukes of Burgundy and Holy Roman Emperor had came to these bountiful possession, had given them over as a unit to his son, Philip II of Spain.
While the modern Netherlands had revolted against the rule of Spain in Philip's own lifetime, Spain retained control over what now constitutes the Kingdom of Belgium until the 18th Century, when, following the War of Spanish Succession, they were returned as Imperial possessions to the Austrian branch. Its administration right before the Revolt gives us insight to the way the non-Imperial Habsburgs had administered their dominions abroad: The privy Council of the Netherlands convened by the Spanish governor, the Duke de Alba, to govern the Netherlands, was composite of two great local noblemen, a few respected local legal experts and, most importantly, a group of Spanish advisors to the governor who alone held voting rights in judicial matters.
The Council had functioned as a high-court but also as an executive cabinet, nevertheless in that latter function, its role has been merely advisory - all actual authority rested with the Duke, who had received it from the King's hand, rather from the consent of either the commons or the nobility of the province. The physical manifestation of this authority were the foreign troops (mostly Spaniards and Italians) which the Duke had brought with him and whose loyalty was forged in the Schmalkaldic War and other conflicts between the emperor - the King's father - and the Lutheran Princes, as well as the Italian Wars against the French.
The Nature and Origin of the Spanish State
Unlike the evolution of the French State or the member states of the Holy Roman Empire, the crowns of Christian Spain emerged from a slow but intense revolution.
In the early 8th century, in the far Northwestern corner of Iberia, a nobleman whose family had fallen afoul in the previous generation with the last of the Visigothic kings had rebelled against the Umayyad Caliphate.
We do not know what the local muslim commander has done to raise the ire of such a natural ally as Pelagius of Cantabria, we only know that Pelagius had raised the only successful rebellion of a conquered non-muslim population and established the Kingdom of Asturias -the progenitor of the Kingdoms of Leon, Castille, and Portugal.
In 801 the Frankish kings had established on the other side of the Iberian Peninsula, at the feet of the Pyrenees, the Marches of Gothia and Hispania, which would later evolve to the County of Barcelona and the Kingdom of Aragon.
The ideology, goals and conditions of their lands forced the Christian kings of Spain to compromise, to cajole, to persuade people into their service more than in any other realm in Europe.
First, they sought to emulate the bureaucratic structure of their Islamic neighbors and rivals which gave them greater resources and direct power over their subject..
Second, they have emulated their policies of colonization and repopulation of lands devastated by war- by inviting peasants from foreign lands, within and without Iberia, to settle on them. Those included German knights, French peasants, Muslim artisans, Jewish merchants and Italian monks.
All these disparate groups required special arrangements to make their settlement feasible, convenient and attractive. These arrangements were known as fueros - solemn obligations between the King and the various communities under his authority.
The Breaking of the Law
The forceful conversion of Jews during the 14th and 15th century, the prosecution of these Conversos, the establishment of the Inquisition as a royal institution to that end and the Expulsion of the Jews- all these were not mere violations, but royal rebellion against both the secular Law of Spain and the precepts of the Church.
The Church, as a body, was always ambivalent in its opinion of forced conversion, especially of Jews, albeit it reluctantly accepted them as valid.
No lesser authority than Bernard de Clairvaux (Letter 391:6, "To the English People" inside Bruno Scott James "Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux", London. 1953, PP. 462-463) had admonished the participants of the Second Crusade to not attempt to forcefully convert or annihilate the Jewish communities of the Rhinelands, since such act would be against Christ's purpose for Israel to turn to him in the end of days. St. Bernard did not hesitate even to use his monastic authority (he was an abbot in the Cistercian order) to reign in a mendicant preacher by the name of Ralph or Raoul (Letter 393, To Henry, Archbishop of Mainz, ibid, PP. 465-466), which have been calling for exactly such action, and demanding he be cloistered.
It is important to note that Bernard, who reflects the mainstream opinion of the Church in his time, does not talk in the spirit of toleration towards the Jewish faith - he believes the Jews are in grave error and that the Jewish exile, dispersion and "hard captivity under Christian princes" is both a sign and a punishment of the error of rejecting Jesus and for his death (for which he still blames the Jews, as was the common opinion in the Middle Ages). The killing of Jews who refuse to convert he calls in his letter to the Archbishop of Mainz "murder" and warns that "those who take up the sword, shall perish by the sword". Nor was it the position of the Church that converts should distance themselves from their old families or cease harmless and innocent practices they were raised up in and which posed no threat to their Christian faith. But he still sees forceful conversion as a distasteful waste of future conversion by persuasion.
The main feature of Spanish Law was that obligations from the King to his subjects - such as the Fueros - were to be honored. That the King was to defend his various subjects not only from foreign enemies but also from domestic predation.
Starting in 1391, a series of anti-Jewish pogroms had led to a wave of forced conversions, both amongst poor Jews wishing to escape prosecution and rich Jews wishing to preserve their wealth and position in royal service. These Conversos, as they came to be known, often continued to dwell in the same Jewish streets they always inhabited and maintained relationships with their Jewish relatives. Many of them - in all due likelihood, something between a plurality and a majority- actually came to sincerely adopt the Christian faith, and were integrated into Christian society (it is important to note that naturally, the Conversos came from the part of Spanish Jewry most likely to accept Christianity in the first place rather than those who would rather face dispossession and death). However, zealots and bigots continued to accuse them of being insincere Christians, Judaizers and heretics. Especially they resented their continuous association with their Jewish friends and families, which did not shun them.
The Crown responded by a series of measures intended to pacify the zealots- laws separating New from Old Christians into different legal categories were introduced, creating for the first time in Spanish history the idea of race-based legal distinctions. Practicing Jews were warned to keep away from Christians - even their own family members - and vice versa. Most importantly, a Royal Inquisition court was set up.
Conversos were dragged before the Inquisition without regard to the local laws and royal charters. They were executed based on testimonies extracted under pressure or those uttered in neighborly malice. They were accused of such absurdities as hearing Jewish Prayers in the Manner of the Mass - which, unless it was an original creation of the Conversos, did not exist in 15th century Judaism. Changing one's linen on a Saturday, neglecting church attendance or lax observance of lent (which Christian could say that they are completely innocent of such minute infractions?), preparing of Jewish dishes, speaking in Judeo-Castilian or reading Hebrew books (who would be invariably labeled as Jewish books by the accusing witnesses, who could not read them), visiting one's Jewish relatives - all these would be taken as signs of Judaizing and apostatizing - and the punishment would be death by burning at the stake.
As Pope Sixtus IV put it in his letter of April 18 1482, merely four years after he granted his own official permission for the erection of the Inquisition:
"In Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca, and Catalonia the Inquisition has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls but by lust for wealth. Many true and faithful Christians, on the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves, and other lower and even less proper persons, have without any legitimate proof been thrust into secular prisons, tortured and condemned as relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and property and handed over to the secular arm to be executed, to the peril of souls, setting a pernicious example, and causing disgust to many."
It is of course inevitable that many Conversos indeed return to the faith of their fathers - and glory to God for that! but the majority of Conversos - sometimes even spouses, siblings and friends of such people- were Catholic believers who had accepted the Church's doctrine after decades of exhortation by diligent clergymen.
The mass conversions of 1391 were mostly motivated by fear, and Jews treated their timid brethren with compassion. However, by 1414 a whole new generation was born to these culturally Jewish Christians, whose parents were more often than not too cautious or ignorant to secretly instruct in the finer points of Judaism, and the Church, which was all around them, and in whose life they had to participate from their birth, had a superior position to influence them. By that time the second wave of mass - conversion had arrive, and this one was voluntary. Iberian Judaism was impoverished of its best talents by the pogroms of 1391 and the flight of its scholars, but also torn by the internal struggle between Maimonidean scholastics, anti-Maimonidean traditionalists, pseudo-Maimonidean Averroists (who were mostly indifferent to religion - as the common Rabbinic outcries against their exploits shows) and the emerging Zoharic mystics. Under such conditions, it is no wonder it could not compete with the fiery preaching of Catholic priests, who enjoyed great endowments for education and were granted license by the Crown to preach to the Jews.
By the time of the establishment of the Inquisition in 1478, its future victims were already ensconced in Christian life for 87 years, enough time for four generations to be born and raised under the tutelage of the Church.
The Inquisition- a Royal Institution of Statecraft
It is important to note that Isabelle had already achieved the integration of the Jews as direct subjects of the State by other means beforehand, as her letter to the Jewish Community (aljama) of Seville from 1477 reads:
I take under my protection the Jews of the aljamas in general and each one in particular, as well as their persons and their property; I protect them against any attack, whatever their nature ...; I forbid that they be attacked, killed or injured; I also forbid that they adopt a passive attitude if they are attacked, killed or injured.
But this inclusion in the body of her subjects was not integration into a single body of law under which the Jews were protected in the same manner that all Castilian subjects were. The Jews were protected because they were her Jews, not because the natural and Divine Law demanded that they would be left alone and that it was her duty to protect them.
However, with the framing of the innocent and predictable behavior of the Conversos as dangerous, insidious and widespread heresy, the monarchs had recognized an opportunity.
The Inquisition was, originally, more a framework for the prosecution of heretics within the Church hierarchy than a permanent body. Only by the 12th century, with the spread of Catharism and Waldensianism, it was established as permanent institution. Even during the height of the anti-Albigensian inquisition it remained a very lean body - most of the investigative work was done by Dominican friars who were already engaged in countering these heterodox sects through preaching in the countryside. It was subject to the authority of the Church hierarchy - originally it was the responsibility of the local bishop to investigate the spread of heresy in his own diocese. Only after the true scale of the Cathar heresy and the failure of French bishops to stop its spread did the Popes create permanent Legatine inquisitors. It was only by long process that the use of torture was allowed, and it was subject to Papal inspection and regulation - indeed an important reason for the Papal takeover of inquisitorial functions was to prevent unjust prosecution of the innocent, by wrestling the judicial process against heretics from local secular authorities who were prone to abuse them.
Seen in this light, Ferdinand and Isabelle's actions are much more damning. They believed that they have found the perfect way to extend their authority, unbound by the regular Law or by the Fueros, over every single person in their now-unified realm.
By declaring the equivalent to the modern day idea of a State of Emergency of spiritual public health, they have raised an Inquisition - but this was a royal Inquisition, not a Papal or even an ecclesiastic institution. The inquisitors were chosen by the Crown, especially the Grand Inquisitors. Despite being invariably clergymen (the Dominicans were recruited in droves to the task) were not bound under the authority of the local bishops and archbishops and not tied, in their capacity as inquisitors, to a particular parish, diocese or any other church establishment. Furthermore, as the judges and investigators of a spiritual court they were exempt from the restrictions usually imposed on judges by the (national or local) Civil and Common Law; meanwhile, their aforementioned independence from any real episcopal authority and their plenary power as appointees of the monarchs freed them from adherence to the finer points of Canon Law. In short, they did as they wished.
In both theory and practice, once the wound was healed, the disease cured, the heresy eradicated, the inquisitors were supposed to pack up their Court, return to their monasteries and allow the regular course of life to resume. Indeed, that was the fate of the anti-Abighenisian Inquisition, which fizzled out as their mission was largely accomplished.
The Spanish Inquisition, however, never reached that stage; it was only abolished in 1812 by the Napoleonic regime - and by the rival, liberal, British sponsored Cadiz Cortes the following year - and was restored under the reactionary government for a short period before its final demise in 1826. Let us remember that the last openly observant Jew had left Spain, by royal decree, in 1492. The Inquisition shifted its focus in the 16th century to the prosecution and public humiliation (and execution) of people accused of various transgressions - from fraud and horse stealing to Lutheranism. The beauty of this shift is that those crimes could be pinned on every Spaniard - not just Conversos, who disappeared as a cultural group due to the efforts of the Inquisition.
The role of the Spanish Inquisition was thus not to stamp out a temporary flaring up of heresy, rather, it was a brutal and cynical tool in the hands of the monarchs, while they could wield it - the weakness of later Spanish monarchs led to this authority being afforded to the State in general - of which the Inquisition had become an integral part. It was the means by which the Government of Spain could tear up any charter, violate every custom, prosecute any person or group, terrorize the entire citizenry. This way, a complex State, made up by compromise and solemn agreements between representatives of sundry religious communities, many divergent ethnic groups, speaking a whole slew of tongues could be remade in the image of the monarchs - in particular that of Isabelle, always the senior partner - Castilian in language, zealot in her faith, jealous of her power, easy to take offense, slow, but sure to return it, and above all, demanding loyalty and gratitude while giving none.
For three and a half centuries after its inception, three centuries after the last openly practicing Jew had left the Peninsula, the inquisition was still hounding the descendants of so called New Christians - but its jurisdiction grew beyond that - even covering simple crimes such as fraud. It has become the State's cudgel of choice.
The Royal Subordination and Subjugation of the Iberian Church
If we examine the picture above, the role of the Church, and the Inquisition in particular, is clear: The inquisitors hover over the Monarchs as wise advisors, assistants and councilors, but it is the Monarchs to whom the Madonna is revealed, who are at the center of the picture and expected to carry out the Divine Writ on Earth.
The piety and devotion expressed in their eyes is sincere and counterfeit at the same time - they truly believe in their mission to increase their own power to the utmost limit, and to grant themselves license to destroy the long-held legal rights and protections of those who will resist them. It is the piety of self-worship. In Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor once vied for parity with the Pope over the entire Church structure. In England, all kings before Henry VIII regarded the Church as a source of authority external to the Crown and to which even the Crown owed obedience. In newly united Spain, the Church was the source of unlimited royal power and liberation of the State from legal constraints. What we see here is not the Temporal Power submitting to God's Law, embodied in the Church, as in the penance of Henry II of England or of emperor Henry Barbarossa in Canossa- but rather, the bald-faced assertion that identity of the Divine Will with that of the Crown- with the Church slinking in the manner of an obedient servant behind the royal persons.
We have mentioned before Pope Sixtus IV's letter to Ferdinand, the king's answer is nothing less than shocking:
Things have been told me, Holy Father, which, if true, would seem to merit the greatest astonishment.
To these rumors, however, we have given no credence because they seem to be things which would in no way have been conceded by Your Holiness who has a duty to the Inquisition.
But if by chance concessions have been made through the persistent and cunning persuasion of the conversos, I intend never to let them take effect. Take care therefore not to let the matter go further, and to revoke any concessions and entrust us with the care of this question.
Here we have a Catholic King, accusing the Pope of selling the cause of the Church and the Inquisition, which the very same Pope had authorized, to the same hated Conversos it was supposed to suppress! If we keep in mind that Ferdinand balmes the influence of the Conversos, a group that existed solely in Spain and had little presence in the Papal court in Rome, we can surmised that he was in the grip of a paranoid delusion or was shamelessly lying.
The picture, however, is not of a dutiful and humble Christian prince submitting to a gentle correction by the Pope, in his governing of a body authorized by the latter. Instead what we have here is a vain, power-drunk ruler who openly warns the head of the Catholic Church to not intervene in his private affairs. Without triggering a schism, the Spanish Crown had declared it would imprison, torture, expel, confiscate and execute as it sees fit. The abuses that Sixtus had pointed out were not, from the royal point of view, errors - they were the point of the institution. Especially as they made every diocese, every parish, monastery and university subject to the authority and fear of the Inquisitors - and by extension, that of the Crown that appointed and empowered them.
Over the next century, the Papacy would outright give the Spanish Crown authority over New World dioceses, effectively ceding its authority over all Christians in Spain's overseas dominions. The reasoning was simple- not only was Spain one of the greatest Catholic kingdoms in a Europe that was marching towards Reformation, the Papacy lacked any ability to even commune with the New World churches wi
Spanish Churchmen would learn of their subservient role in the next centuries when the Crown would exploit its influence and devotion to bring the New World under their command, and yet ignore their opinions regarding the proper Christian treatment of the Natives.
2: Conclusion: Crown, Church, Nation:
Old Western Feudalism not merely divided the coherent states of the Carolingian era into competing, feuding fiefdoms, but actually achieved, in its failure, what the Carolingians failed to do in their success- to create stable centers of recognized legal orders.
It is no accidents that the the three centers of the three legal orders of feudalism coalesced into the greatest early modern European states- which have turned to modern nations. In France, in England and the Empire, the Crown- the King or the Emperor- while not enjoying the full and direct power of the State over their subject, were the centers and final arbiters of their regional legal world which governed their local variant of Feudalism. As the Feudal Class declined and shattered, the newly elevated Nobility of Service could adopt such legal centrality into a universally applicable code, subjecting to its rule the entire citizenry, which was chosen carefully at first, but than expanded to the entire population.
The religious establishment of the Europe, the hierarchical Latin Church and the disparate Jewish mini-republics could not, despite maintaining their own laws and state-like structure compete with the Crown and establish a central State.
As they all depended, ultimately, on the recognition of the Crown (as the center of civil and common law) to defend them and recognize their claims to authority, they had hard enough challenge set for them to resist becoming its mere playthings and servants. Secular politics set the conditions within which they operated, and therefore they had to participate or alter their behavior from one region to another. This led to real divergence in both Jewish and Christian identity from one realm to another, creating nations amongst the chosen Citizenry of the State- the Christian, politically capable classes - and spending the next 5 centuries expanding that citizenry, and the Nation, to include the entire populace - in the case of France, the nationalization of the Peasantry was not complete well into the 19th century; Russia never finished nationalizing its population. Germany had nationalized its population three times within 80 years, each one redesigning German identity in a different direction.
The political dynamics of the Jews in the the marginal lands of Europe were not dissimilar to those of their Christian neighbors - Italian Jews were divided between petty Qahal organizations, and were sharply divided between the Yiddish speakers of the North, who descended from across the Alps, the native Italiani of Romagna and Tuscany, and the Iberian (mostly Aragonese) Jews of the South, despite relative unity and tranquility of their religious life. The Commonwealth Jews enjoyed the strongest organization in Europe, but their Congress of Four Lands was, on average, riven by controversy at least once every second generation. The Cossack-Szlachta Civil War of the 1640s, which was a tremendous blow to the Jews of Union, was followed by the internal controversy over the Sabbatean heresy - the embers of which were still glowing by the 1760s, only to be followed by the rift between the emerging Hassidic movement and its opponents in the last decades of the Commonwealth's existence. In Iberia, the Jewish local organizations, the Jama'ahs, that prospered and grew in internal power during the long centuries of the Iberian divide had sunk to ever lower division and weakness. Fatal were the theological controversies that flourished in this land of learning and debate - worse was the traditional influence of politically connected Jews - who in previous time have been the pillars of the Jama'ah's freedom and cohesion, now became a conduit by which the Crown could exert control over the Jews' internal affairs. Many of them were the leaders of the movement out of Judaism and into the arms of the Catholic Church. Some, such as Joshua of Lorca (who took the Christian name Hieronymus de Sancta Fide) and his friend and mentor, Solomon HaLevi (later Pablo de Sancta Maria of Burgos) actively goaded the prosecution and harassments of their former brethren to push them to the baptismal font.
In the marginal, composite realms of Italy, Poland-Lithuania and Spain, where the legal center of the local feudal order have shattered and reforged time after time, no such sense of centrality, permanence and generality of Law could serve as a springboard for the State. The leadership of these lands have tried various ways to paper over the cracks in their national edifice- either by legislative consensus as in the Commonwealth, by one center attempting to establish hegemony over the others - who ended up accepting that of a foreign power instead, or by abusing one institution and wielding it as a cudgel.
Thus we have found that in the polities of the European core- England, France and the Empire - religion was understood as the business of the national community to determine - a position that will eventually lead to great wars of religion, and finally, a national settlement. Without the Nation, the Church couldn't become a national institution- instead it either became a cudgel in the hands of another institution within the State - such as the Spanish Crown- to force national amalgamation, remained a background institution, external to the State, or broke up to distinct churches, each serving different groups, and strengthening their hatred, which would tear the State apart.
II: The Undying Lands - Faith, Ethnicity and Citizenship in the Americas
1. The Iberian Empires
Introduction: At the King's Pleasure - Metropolitan Domination of the Iberian Colonies
The problem facing the Spaniards in the New World was that for the first time since the Crusades a European Latin Christian regime attempted to assert its dominance over people and territories with tradition and civilization was nothing but.
Spain was actually in a better position to do so since it's spent the last few centuries integrating exactly such provinces. The difference is that in Iberia, Christians were interspersed between the Muslim population even in areas of Muslim domination. The New World was a completely Virgin Territory for Iberian catholicism.
Furthermore, the very concept of the State, of the Law and all the other things that enabled western states to exist in self-cohere, did not exist in central and south America, not to mention the Caribbean. Spain and all the other Western christian Lance have been a secular state based on the authority of the crown with local Elites dominating their internal politics, with the church being a parallel Institution, sometimes competing and sometimes complementing the state.
Central American states on the other hand have been the domain of God-Kings and priest-Kings and where the extension of religious ceremony. They had neither the old Roman heritage, the carolingian heritage, not to mention the feudal heritage. The non-state territories of America resembled the ancient Germanic tribes described by pacitus more than it did anything else in the history of Europe.
The Americas have been an even more alien environment to Iberian style politics than the Muslim world which was dominated by states which were the expression of the Divine writ of the Quran and by rulers that were either themselves or were ruling in the name of the heirs to the prophet.
Their aristocracy was divided between a warrior Elite with direct loyalty to the supreme ruler and I learned Ulama, that is Scholars expert in the interpretation of the Divine Law. But Islam was a religion of the mind and of the heart just like Judaism and Christianity it required no great collection of resources for sacrifices, human or otherwise.
It did not need much beyond the erection of houses of worship and learning and their maintenance. Holy war, for instance, was pursued for its own sake and for military goals which was Sanctified by the law that is: The acquisition territory and the imposition of State Authority over said territory. In pre-Columbian America,however, war was a ritual quest to obtain human bodies for sacrifice and subject local gods and their cults to those of the Central Temple-State.
This made the task of the Spanish conquerors much easier, but made the consolidation of the Spanish positions in the Western Hemisphere much more difficult. We will attempt here to review some of the strategies developed by the Spanish Crown to achieve that goal while maintaining the dependence of New Spain on the Old.
Faith, Ethnicity and Citizenship
When Hernán Cortés landed on the Yucatan shore in 1519, the Inquisition was nearly 40 years old, and was fast becoming an integral part of the Spanish State apparatus. Furthermore, as it became clear to the Spaniard, Mexico has been a land of actual pagans, and ones practicing the most vile form of it - with the State acting merely as the arm of the human sacrifice cults, initiating wars to capture or extract the gods' human tribute from weaker tribes. The Inquisitorial system was not officially established in Mexico until 1571, but the work of conversion, and investigation of back-sliding, started almost immediately - following the failed Mayan revolt of 1546-1547, Franciscan and Dominican friars had conducted an inquisition in all but name:
Under the leadership of Fray Diego de Landa, who had arrived in New Spain in the late 1540s, they set out to make a terrible example of those they identified as back-sliders without regard to proper legal formalities. Large numbers of people were subjected to torture and as many of the Maya sacred books as could be found were burned to the great affliction of those who witnessed the scene.
So while the justification for the prosecution of the Jewish and Moorish (that is, former Muslim) Conversos in Spain had dubious merits to it beyond the spread of terror for the benefit of the State, the only way in which Spain could have established its dominion at all was mass conversion and enforcement of Catholicism, by force if necessary, and the total eradication of the native cults.
It is very telling that new churches were built on the site where the old temples once stood, that Spanish governors took residence in old native palaces, that Spanish and native nobility intermarried.
The intent of the Conquistadores was, according to the historian Brian R. Hamnett, to rule Mexico and the other developed native states using their old structures, merely replacing the old ruling class with themselves and the native religions with Iberian Catholicism.
The Spanish were not gentle masters. From the Aztecs and Incas they inherited an elaborate system of labor taxation, and initially, labor tributes of particular communities, or encomiendas were disbursed to individual Conquistadores and elite native collaborators as reward for their services, in what constituted, effectively, serfdom. This system was replaced, in Mexico, by allotment for a limited time of native laborers to various individuals by the Crown during the first half of the 16th century.
Much of the advocacy against the subjugation of the native populace and its abuse was done by the same religious orders whose members went amongst the Native to preach the gospel. They have found no small purchase in surprising, surface level similarities between certain rites of the native cults and Catholicism - immersion in water and adoption of a new name. The consumption of a representative baked figures of the gods and of their blood. The veneration of various deities that could be, with enough charity and good will, be transfigured into the images of Catholic saints. This was not a cynical ploy - a common belief of the friars was that the native religions were natural and healthy expressions of Mankind's inherent draw towards God, that were merely corrupted and exploited by demons (what else would Catholic monks call the mythic gods that instituted large scale human sacrifice?) - in their minds, they were not imposing a foreign faith on the Natives, merely correcting and mending their inherited customs to fit with the Christian truth.
Iberian Settlement and Culture
The Spanish Crown had no great challenge replacing the population deficit that the wars and diseases that followed its dominion brought to its Empire in the New World.
Similar circumstances in newly acquired Iberian regions during the Reconquista often dictated to Castilian and Aragonese monarchs a need to invite French, German and even Italian settlers from abroad and grant land and charters to domestic settlers. The same strategy was employed in the New World- the domestic foreigners of Iberia, as well as inhabitants of its poorest regions - the Basques, the Galicians, the Andalusians - as well as Conversos and Moriscos -jumped on the opportunity for a new land, identity and charters of freedom in the Indies. To them joined Desperados- scions of good Castilian and Aragonese families who had fallen down with Fortune, had got themselves into trouble or otherwise were glad to leave Spain behind them. These would form the domestic ruling caste of Creoles, with the various castas resulting from the union of Iberians, Natives, and African slaves, forming the lower rungs of society together with the Naturales - that is, the Natives already dwelling in the lands of New Spain.
However, the highest rungs of government would be kept to the functionaries that each viceroy would bring over with him from the Homeland. These Peninsulares, often belonging to the more impoverished side of the hidalgo class (a class of minor gentry unique to Spain, akin to the English country squire) represented not merely a peacetime replay of the invasion- the top spots in government taken by outsiders, who could plunder, swindle and squeeze the Creole as well as the Native- but also a constant cultural funnel to Iberia. Not only did the Creoles and the Hispanized Natives create a version of Spain in the New World, the culture of the Viceregal court and Mexico-City high society ensure it never drifts far from the old Peninsular culture.
Missions and the Culture of the Empire
The aforementioned Regular Orders (that is those governed by a rule or regula of monastic life) and the Jesuits became the driving force in the conversion of the Natives. But while they have maintained their religious houses in Mexico City, and worked diligently for the conversion of the heart of the new empire, their work soon carried them further afield, to places where no more than a Spanish garrison could be maintained, at best. Their tactic would have to change, as well as their attitude.
The Missions were truly innovative institutions, with nothing like then in Iberian history. The closest thing to them were the Irish monasteries of the early Christian centuries, and the Spanish monks of the 16th century were unlikely to be aware of it.
Sometimes following Spanish expeditions establishing presidio garrisons, the Mission House was a place where natives soon learned they could find shelter, food and medicine in times of need. It was also a place where desirable goods can be had- glass, metal and other European goods. Furthermore, the Mission House was permanent and constant.
Around these mission houses the reducciónes - communities standing under the direct supervision of the friars, populated by Christian Natives- either coalesced or were assembled by force.
In these communities the Natives would be shown- and made to practice - farming (where they weren't practicing agriculture before), European and other crafts, and Catholic Christianity. The Mission House slowly but surely shifted native culture in the provinces, whether in preexistent settlements or in the new reducciónes and not only Baptized it, but brought it more in line with Iberian culture. For we must make no mistake - the friars, as concerned as they were for the souls of the Natives, were still loyal Spanish subjects. They may have disagreed with the manner in which the heartlands of the dominions of the Crown were administered, and would even, on at least one occasion, come to blows with colonial authorities to defend their charges from enslavement, but they still thought the suzerainty of their king would be salutary to them, and was at any rate desirable in and of by itself.
The dusty plains of Texas would never resemble those of Castile, nor would even the great, late-renaissance cities of Mexico City, Cartagena and Lima ever have quite the same character as those of Madrid, Burgos, or Barcelona.
But the former were made less foreign, somehow closer to the latter even than their fellow European cities of Toulouse, Aachen or Rome. The Spanish transatlantic empire was created by deeds of arms, by the craft and guile of administrators in the New World and in Madrid just as much as by the blessings of the Pope, but it's imperial civilization was created by the slow and arduous toil of the friars in the wilderness. It is quite possible that if not for the casta system and the disintegration of the Spanish State during the Napoleonic occupation of the mother-country, that the Empire would have survived to this day.
2. Anglo-French America
Introduction: Praying Towns and Shining Cities - The Different Approaches to Native Conversion
Spanish (and to a lesser degree, Portuguese) successes in the Americas had whetted the appetites of all the orders of the French, English and even the Dutch States. The Crowns of England and France had desired the riches of the New World. The less fortunate amongst the Nobility of Service fantasized of either becoming great landlords like tegu Creole encomenderos or to govern great and wealthy provinces on behalf of the Crown. Merchants and other burghers dreamed and raised corporations to handle, service, traffic and put such wealth to some profitable use. French Churchmen, while agreeing that their Iberian brethren make tremendous progress amongst the Native, couldn't but to assure themselves that surely, French Jesuits would be better tutelaries. Anglican bishops and (more loudly) Calvinists elders agreed it was a damned shame the Natives first introduction to the blessed Gospels was done by the so-called agents of Rome.
They soon came to the disappointing, but sobering realization they could not, in fact, conquer New Spain without exhausting the resources they required to maintain their homelands. Nevermind, the occasional raid on the Spanish treasure fleets would have to do. But to realize the dream of a New World Empire the other powers of Europe would have to look to the less populated, prosperous, learned and tamed half- to the Northern continent.
The Natives of North America were not devoid of cities, government, commerce and all the other ornaments of civilization. As a matter of fact, a complex trade network has connected the Woodland peoples of the East Coast with the fertile Mississippi Valley. Nevertheless, in the very same century that Europe had begun to shift out of the Feudal Order, the Mississippian culture, the most advanced Northern American urban civilization, had started declining. We know not what was the cause, but warfare, turmoil and mayhem are evident in the archeological findings. The great mound cities shrunk and disappeared. Useful arts such as the working of copper become forgotten. At any rate, the trade network the great city of Cahokia (whose actual name is lost to history) wove across the Continent never amounted to a true empire; the woodland cultures of the East Coast knew little of it even in its heyday. By the time English settlers arrived in Roanoke, it had not even a memory.
South and Central America had highly developed agricultural and commercial systems.
They had natural resources, not the least of which were precious metals such as The Rich Mountain of Potosi in modern-day Bolivia. But most important, it had even prior to the arrival of the Spaniards domineering, tyrannical central governments who broke the resistance of the population to enslavement and exploitation long before the conquest. The Spaniards had administered the entire murderous operation at Potosi through the traditional Inca corvée system, the mit'a.
None of this existed in North America. The most centralized system of control in the East Coast was in the Iroquois Republic and the Powhatan Confederacy. Even these were relatively free societies, with no system of coerced labor and without an all-powerful tyrant (even the Paramount Chiefs of the latter, who were essentially kings, never accrued to themselves a fraction of the power of enjoyed by the Aztec Tlatoani or by a Sapa Inca).
It is therefore ironic that while the conquest of South and Central America was done in the name of faith and by extensions of the State itself, it was their poorer sister-continent to the North which was settled by private, for profit corporations. Even the Pilgrims in Plymouth Rock had to organize as one and seek the support of the Merchants Adventurers of London.
We must not underestimate the Northern Natives - while they lacked impressive and complex urban structures, their society could be said to be, in many ways, more prosperous.
As Fernand Braudel had shown, the average Mexica or Inca individual was an abused farmer, living a poor existence in a hut and subsisting almost exclusively on maize. The thin strip of the nobility and the priesthood (one and the same really) had enjoyed all the improvements and achievements of their civilization - with some advantages to the urban population which serviced them. The peasant enjoyed none of that - on the contrary, he was liable to be taxed heavily in goods and labor. The average Powhatan or Iroquois, however, had a much more varied existence - the cereal portion of his meal was made up of maize, yes, but his diet also included meat, beans, tubers and nuts , fish and vegetables.
Maize requires relatively little time to grow (compare to Old World cereals such wheat, barley or rice), but while the Mexican and Inca peasant found his entire free time filled up with corvée duties, the Northern Natives could dedicate it to hunting, fishing, fighting or any other occupation. While his dwelling was not impressive in the standards of urban civilization, it was sufficient for the needs of a woodland dweller. Contrary to a long standing myth, the Northern Natives didn’t live in the woodlands out of their inability to conquer the forest - just like medieval European peasants, they cultivated the forest, which have supplied them with game, wood for their boats, nuts, fur, and even shelter from their enemies. For the Natives of the East Coast, cutting down or burning out the forest was an act of wanton destruction equal to the wasting of fields or razing of cities, not to be taken lightly. Their settlements were small - as woodland settlements must be - but they were neat and orderly, with dedicated plots for growing maize, vegetables, even tobacco.
The territory and settlement of New France, while more closely controlled by the Crown, was also seen as a commercial enterprise rather than an Imperial one - the main reason for the maintenance of the colony was the Native fur trade network, which had existed for some time before the French arrival. In this sense, the French strategy of settlement was not as different from the Spanish one - while the latter had installed themselves at the head of a Native State order, the former had made themselves the terminus of a Native market system. The French even adopted the idea of the Spanish missions and the reducciones - the main difference was that the French utilized almost exclusively Jesuit brothers, which had created Praying towns under their supervision and attempted to convert as many of the people outside of them as well.
The English settlement was way less coherent or controlled.
The commercial companies that organized them were genuine private enterprises, despite operating, like all English corporations at the time, under a royal letter-patent. Its directors hoped for profit and wagered a great deal of their private fortunes, as well as that of their subscribers and shareholders, in the undertaking. King James I was well disposed towards this particular company but invested little of his own private fortune or the public treasury in it.
But even as little control over or interest for (beyond signing the Charter) the Virginia Company James had, it was less so for its sister company, the Plymouth Company of Virginia, organized, officially by one George Popeham.
In fact, Popeham, while he was a genuine explorer and settler of the East Coast, was shielding an enterprise that was much more obnoxious to James' domestic and European policy: namely, the establishment of a Puritan Commonwealth in the New World, in effect creating a new, English version of Calvin's Geneva in the periphery of the expanding European World rather than its center.
We must not think of the Pilgrims the way many people tend to think of the extremely devout these days- either as lovable loons with their heads in the clouds, or as deluded fanatics led by cynics and hypocrites.
That there was much to love about the Pilgrims is indisputable, despite their flaws. That they had their heads in the clouds is a well established fact, and that they were fanatics, a simple truth. But they were no lunes, had little delusions and no illusions whatsoever, and were the last people to be led astray by a cynical charlatan.
These were hard-nosed, stiff-collared, sensitive, well-read, argumentative, bean-counting, practical, commercial and entrepreneurial English fanatics from the prosperous lands in the East - East Anglia, Lincolnshire, Kent.
They were the products of four centuries of peasants clawing upwards, saving every penny, counting every farthing, watching with baleful eye over the least strand of raw wool to be shipped to Flanders; but also of a century and a half of reading the Good Book with an inquisitive, questioning eye, of looking for the least flaw in one's character (or neighbors) as a mark of damnation, in accordance to the teachings of John Calvin; of snubbing one's nose at the vicar, at the Bishop, even at the still-too-adorned, not-yet-completely-protestant Church of England.
The Pilgrims did not dismiss the idea of converting the native peoples out of hand - the earliest classes of Harvard theological college enrolled native students (such as the Nipmuc John Wampus or Wompas, also known as John White), and missionaries such as John Eliot went forth and preached in native villages that would have them, establishing a new class of praying Indians and establishing praying towns such as Natick.
But the true goal of the Pilgrims, from the beginning, was the planting of a new Christian community out of the ol tree of Christian England, not the creation of a new community by mass conversion of the indigenous. Even the praying towns (which were genuine autonomous townships, unlike the Spanish and French reducciónes) had a separate existence from the English-founded towns. The most telling is the fact that while the French, Spanish and even the English settlement of Virginia all were started by sending mostly men alone into the wilderness (either as soldiers or settlers), which have later required specific shipping of women to these colonies or marriage between Europeans and Natives. New England, on the other hand, was, from the beginning, settled by families who left England and the Netherlands together, with their movables packed neatly, knowing full well they would not see their homeland ever again.
The common denominator to the way the new European empires in the New World was that:
They have all to a degree inserted themselves in to a preexisting complex social system in some vital role previously held by a different dominant group or by no one in particular (the Spanish had replaced the Aztec and Inca nobility, the French made themselves the final destination of the entire fur trade network, and the English everywhere had taken the place previously reserved to the most populous and powerful tribe). As this task was accomplished, they have assimilated into that system their values, laws, faith and methods of waging war and living in peace.
In likewise manner, all three empires took from the Native system one important feature: they were all decentralized, loose union of polities vaguely associated with each other through loyalty to the Crown, through memory of common descent and shared faith and laws - just as the Indian confederacies were bound together by loyalty to particular chiefs (or the institution of shared chiefdoms), by the idea of common descent, laws and religious lives.
These empires also contain multiple dialects of the same mother tongue, just as the Indian confederacies often coalesced around mutual intelligibility of closely related languages. The various polities differed in their cultural institution - behavior that would cause scandal in Massachusetts Bay would have been considered appropriate, even gallant, in Virginia.
A: One's Conscience -Religious Organization, Competition and Dissent in Anglo-America and Quebec
Both the New England and Virginia settlements had, despite their differences, a common feature which they did not have with French and Spanish empire building. While the latter had established their dominance using the dregs of their Metropolitan societies- prisoners, minorities, poor peasants, cashiered soldiers - and had them led by the poorest members of the minor nobility, the English had sent substantial gentry to inhabit their new colonies from the start.
These two competing classes of quality - the rising, armigerous yeomen merchant and farmer and the scions of the Nobility of Service - both of equally recent elevation, the fruit of the processes by which the Feudal Order had passed, starting their long march i the 14th century - had one thing in common - they were in the habit to command their own affairs, and were even less tolerant of the idea of authority when it was wielded by a chartered company than by the King - who was, admittedly, their superior.
(It is important to note that both Virginia and New England also imported at the secondary stage of their settlement a great deal of the undesirables of English society as well as foreign professionals whose expertise was required. We should also not ignore that middle and high class households traveled with their dependents - servants, poor relations and the like - in tow).
English Churches long had a tradition of vestries - councils of the leading laymen of a given parish handling the temporal affairs and resources of the church. In Old England, however, the lay supervisory authority was checked by clerics on two levels . Forst, the vicar sat in the vestry (indeed the council got its name since it was usually the only room in the church comfortable to hold meetings in, which of course would make it unthinkable to exclude the vicar from them). If we recall, the vicar was independent of the goodwill of his parish and secure in his position which he held as a benefice. Episcopal authority added official review to the actions of the vestrymen and functioned as a binding agent both between the parishes of the diocese and to the Church writ large.
In Virginia, However, the lack of a resident bishop meant that the second layer of clerical review of parishes was lacking. Furthermore, the social position of the vicar was much weaker in Virginia, a land of great landowners, impoverished farmhands and slaves than that of the New England minister, who was surrounded by much more equal and independent parishioners, or the English vicar for that matter, who not only did not have to contend with the social extremities of America, but also have a bishop to support him against otherwise irresistible forces.
B: The Suitable Provision and the Wall of Separation
As the American states achieved their independence, it became impractical for American churches to be dependent on the State-Church of England.
Congregationalists did not see a particular problem in the matter. The Church of England was given up for a loss by the Pilgrims before they departed Leiden- and even their much more pragmatic posterity did not find anything of particular value in it.
Anglicans faced a more difficult position, as their faith demanded they shall have bishops consecrated in Apostolic succession- and their old Bishop of London was ill disposed towards his former flock. Besides, the suppression of American dioceses from rising was, as we have discussed, a deliberate imperial policy to keep the colonies subservient to the Mother-Country. For good patriotic Anglicans such as George Washington, that would simply not do.
I believe we have already discussed the career of Samuel Seabury and the advancement of the Episcopal church - a name chosen to distinguish it from the Presbyterian and Congregationalists churches- but also to emphasize the improvement in the spiritual church of Americans- they now had their own proper episcopal, apostolic hierarchy, where before independence they were deprived of it.
Thus the construction of the American Episcopal hierarchy is parallel to that of the independent American State.
But the American Episcopalians, unlike their Congregationalists brethren, had to learn now to organize a great religious movement for the first time. Before independence, Anglican churches were supported by enforced tithes since they carried the official faith of the Empire. Persecution of dissenter sects was an Imperial policy carried out by a colonial government as part of their colonial obligations to the Crown. Now, with independence, Episcopalians would have to articulate why their church shall have special privileges and protections.
There was another question- that of control.
With consecrated bishops finally overseeing their newly divided dioceses, the vestrymen class had faced with an uncomfortable possibility- that in a State-Church, it would be the bishops who shall dominate the administration of the Church, maybe down to the parish level, depriving them, the leaders of the laity, of their power in its government. The Virginian vestrymen squires did not wish to lose their influence over the Church. Therefore they had to give up the idea of a State-Church, in which the Bishops would have an official position that would compete with theirs. They had enough of that during Colonial times when commissioners of the Bishop of London would sometimes sit in the Governor’s Council.
For Northern Congregationalists this was no issue.
The Congregationalist Church had founded the Massachusetts Bay colony, and its various permutations and breakaway sects were at the founding of Connecticut and Rhode Island. It was well organized from the first decade of the colony. And while the brief period between the Seven Years War and Independence saw the ascendancy of conventional Anglicanism and the conversion of many leading families and figures to the Church of England, it remained the mainstay of religion actually practiced in New England.
Establishment and Disestablishment - a Personal look
Enlightenment ideas, espoused by such men as Thomas Jefferson (who famously and openly refused to acknowledge any miracles appearing in the Gospels and had a very low opinion on the Hebrew Scriptures). Jefferson was no atheist- he believed in a God - an impersonal, benevolent Creator, who set Man as a free and moral agent to forge his own destiny, rather than the very personal God of Israel. The Statute establishing Religious Freedom, which Jefferson penned out, reads:
Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;
That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,
That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;
That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;
That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;
That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,
That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,
that it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it;
That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;
That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;
That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;
And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:
Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,
Nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief,
But that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.
And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right
There is much to unpack here. The breathless, expansive preamble in which Jefferson, as he did in the Declaration of Independence, unloads a charge of philosophical grapeshot.
Jefferson's arguments can be divided in two categories:
Theological ones, regarding the Divine Will and Purpose.
Political ones, regarding the Rights of Man.
Prudential ones, regarding the actual consequences of establishment and disestablishment of religion.
In the first category we can classify the very long argument that appears first- that if God would have approved of established, enforced religion, he would have done it Himself. The very fact that God had given Man agency and freedom to obey or disobey him in all fields of life proves that to God the freedom of Man is much more important than morality or righteousness - that God desire Man to be moral and righteous out of his own volition, not by coercion.
In his political arguments, Jefferson simply posits, axiomatically, that no man has the authority to interfere in another's religious life - that not even a religious community can force its members to support a "teacher of religion". Therefore, for the community to punish any person for refusing to comply or support established religion is an injustice and an act of tyranny. In his prudential argument, Jefferson simply posits that Established Religion cannot achieved its professed goals: First, those who define and enforce the Established religion are themselves fallible and uninspired and therefore are as likely to enshrine and perpetuate error as well as the true doctrines of their religion. Second, the very act of enforcement and establishment produces hypocrisy, tyranny, cruelty and narrow-mindedness - all the vices which religion ought to fight against.
Jefferson follows in his political and prudential arguments George Mason, who had written in the 1775 Virginia Declaration of Rights:
XIV. That Religion, or the Duty which we owe to our Creator, and the Manner of discharging it, can be governed only by Reason and Conviction, not by Force or Violence; and therefore that all Men should enjoy the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion, according to the Dictates of Conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the Magistrate, unless, under Colour of Religion, any Man disturb the Peace, the Happiness, or Safety of Society. And that it is the mutual Duty of all, to practice Christian Forbearance, Love and Charity towards Each other.
The main difference between Jefferson and Mason is therefore theological: Jefferson, who is skeptical of the nature of the true religion and believes it is yet to be formulated by human reason, refuses to be made to publicly support it against his will and better judgment. George Mason, on the other hand, holds out the same position as Bernard of Clairvaux expressed 5 centuries prior - that violence is ineffective in bringing one to the true religion - of whose nature he has no doubt, and he is perfectly capable to define the duties it imparts to the believer - and therefore all religions - save those who are merely a color for criminal activity - ought to be respected and protected - and put at an arm's length from the powers of the State.
In contrast to both the Masonian and Jeffersonian reasoning for disestablishment, the Constitution which John Adams had written for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1780, which we have quoted before, states:
“Art. II.
It is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe.
And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshiping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience, or for his religious profession or sentiments, provided he doth not disturb the public peace or obstruct others in their religious worship.
Art. III.
As the happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government essentially depend upon piety, religion, and morality, and as these cannot be generally diffuse through a community but by the institution of the public worship of God and of the public instructions in piety, religion, and morality:
Therefore, To promote their happiness and to secure the good order and preservation of their government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with power to authorize and require, and the legislature shall, from time to time, authorize and require, the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies-politic or religious societies to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.
And the people of this commonwealth have also a right to, and do, invest their legislature with authority to enjoin upon all the subject an attendance upon the instructions of the public teachers aforesaid, at stated times and seasons, if there be any on whose instructions they can conscientiously and conveniently attend.
Provided, notwithstanding, That the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies-politic, or religious societies, shall at all times have the exclusive right and electing their public teachers and of contracting with them for their support and maintenance.
And all moneys paid by the subject to the support of public worship and of public teachers aforesaid shall, if he require it, be uniformly applied to the support of the public teacher or teachers of his own religious sect or denomination, provided there be any on whose instructions he attends; otherwise it may be paid toward the support of the teacher or teachers of the parish or precinct in which the said moneys are raised.
And every denomination of Christians, demeaning themselves peaceably and as good subjects of the commonwealth, shall be equally under the protection of the law; and no subordination of any sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law.
In short, the Adamsian constitution provided for a State-Church structure which was latitudinarian and open, yet contained and supported within the State structure.
Christian ministers of all (Protestant) stripes could compete for the office of minister in the local church district. Such districts (“the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies-politic or religious societies”) are authorized, by delegation of legislative authority, to compel their members to pay for their maintenance.
Adams' reasoning for religious freedom does not , unlike Mason's or Jefferson's, depend on human frailty and inability to either come to know the true religion or to enforce it effectively, but due to the positive duty of every human being to publicly worship the Supreme Being according to do so in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience, or for his religious profession or sentiments - in other words, coercion of a particular faith is not merely ineffective and tyrannical - it runs counter to the very purpose and essence of religion.
Particularists could have their tithes diverted towards their own organizations - as long as they prove that such allegiance is true and sincere (“provided there be any on whose instructions he attends”)- otherwise the money shall be diverted “toward the support of the teacher or teachers of the parish or precinct in which the said moneys are raised”.
Attendance is a civil duty - no different than jury duty or service in the militia- as long as the subject - that is the citizen - cannot prove that he cannot conscientiously or conveniently attend - that is that attendance would be against his religious principles. Clearly New England had come a long way from the heady days of persecution of Quakers. Indeed the open ended doctrinal nature of the established Church of Massachusetts becomes much more understandable in light of the growing Unitarian movement - which Adams himself was a member of.
Even the clauses in Article III which contained the limitations of such delegated rights to Protestant denominations and the promise of legal protection to all Christian ones did not deprive Catholics and Jews of private protection of the Law.
Since article II specifically promised that no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshiping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience, or for his religious profession or sentiments, provided he doth not disturb the public peace or obstruct others in their religious worship.
It seemed to the good people of Massachusetts that they had arrived at a tolerable and tolerant compromise - the practice all religions is legal as long as their adherents do not violate the Law, but only the religion of the majority is supported - and the definition of that faith is up to the majority to establish by democratic means.
The Competing Unitarians: The Biblical DIsputes of Jefferson and Adams
John Adams’ Unitarianism, the kind that had spread like wildfire in New England, was the direct descendant of the Racovian Catechism of the Polish Brethren from the 16th century.
This faith, whose various branches debated between themselves whether Christ was worthy of worship, but not Divine, or the incarnation of the Logos which they separated from God, was obviously at odds with the rest of Christianity, but did not deny the truth of the Gospels or the Hebrew Scripture. On the contrary, the Polish Brethren and other Unitarians specifically rejected the Trinity as unsupported by the Gospels and contrary to the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures. Adams’ faith was pious, sure, personal and heartfelt. He participated in a vibrant and enthusiastic religious community which expressed itself in traditional shows of Christian piety - prayers, hymns, fast days. He had never ceased to see himself as a Christian
Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, did not care much for the Bible.
In a private letter he calls the God of Israel “a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust”. He disregarded the Jewish faith:
“Moses had bound the Jews to many idle ceremonies, mummeries & observances of no effect towards producing the social utilities which constitute the essence of virtue.”
The only virtue he could find in the Jewish faith was that:
“[Y]our sect by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance, inherent in every sect, disclaimed by all while feeble, and practiced by all when in power. Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religion, as they do our civil rights by putting all on an equal footing. but more remains to be done. ... nothing I think would be so likely to affect this as to your sect particularly as the more careful attention to education, which you recommend, and which placing its members on the equal and commanding benches of science, will exhibit them as equal objects of respect and favor."
The view of Judeo-Christian religion that comes out of these private letters (which were written in 1820 and 1818 - long after his retirement from public life - is almost a secular version of Marcionism - Judasim was obscure, small-minded and useless to the cultivation of virtue, but Jesus in his teaching had introduced a new religion which he “reformed” out of the old one:
“.. the one instilled into his people the most anti-social spirit towards other nations; the other preached philanthropy & universal charity and benevolence.”
Thomas Jefferson displays here all the old accusations thrown at us and our faith for millenia. He even put it down to our feet that Jesus did not simply declare himself the high -minded theistic philosopher he would prefer him to be. He abhorred the “private family God of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob and the local God of Israel”. He advocated for tolerance of Jews and Judaism, but only so they may be placed “on the equal and commanding benches of science” so we may become “equal objects of respect and favor” as our Christian neighbors. Such opinions were clearly borrowed from the writing of Voltaire, which have attacked Christianity as a scions of the faith of the hated Jews - and which hung all the fault he found in Christianity at the Jews’ neck, without justification or knowledge
Adams had too much intellectual honesty to engage in such nonsense or even tolerate it. In a 1808 letter he mocks Voltaire:
“Every Body read his works. His Dramatic Compositions, his Epick Poems, his Historical Works, his astonishing Multitude of fugitive Pieces, his favourite Doctrines of Liberty temporal and spiritual and his daring attacks upon the Pope, the Monastic orders, and the whole Hierarchy of the Romish Church occasioned him to be more universally read than any other author that ever lived. This reputation gave him power to propagate through the world the miserable spoils which he borrowed or stole from the English Infidels with an effrontery more unjustifiable and inexcusable than that of the Hebrews which he censures so bitterly, when they borrowed Gold and Silver and Jewels of the Egyptians.
In opposition to him I have been consulting the Letters of the Jews of Portugal, Holland, Germany and Poland.
Never was poor Culprit more genteelly whipped at the whipping post. They have convicted him of ignorance of every Thing he pretended to know and in multitude of Instances proved him to be guilty of the grossest Lies and Impostures as well as of inconsistencies and contradictions innumerable.
Although I have been so highly entertained as to neglect my most precious Correspondent I would not advise him ever to spend his time so idly, at least unless he should ever have as much Leisure as I have, and that I am very sure can never happen.
I have no Amanuensis and if I had I would not copy this Letter and therefore I pray you to burn it.”
In a 1813 letter to Jefferson, he writes:
“In your Letter to Priestley of March 21. 1801, dated at Washington you call “The Christian Philosophy, the most Sublime and benevolent, but the most perverted System that ever Shone on Man.” That it is the most Sublime and benevolent, I agree, But whether it has been more perverted than that of Moses, of Confucius, of Zoroaster, of Sanchuniathon of Numa, of Mahomet of the Druids, of the Hindoos &c &c &c I cannot as yet determine; because I am not sufficiently acquainted with those Systems or the History of their Effects to form a decisive opinion of the result of the Comparison."
He agrees with Jefferson that the Jewish religion was, at the time of Jesus, in a degraded state and required reformation. But he has no malice towards it - degeneration seems to him the most natural and common religious phenomenon, which requires reform. He praises Jefferson’s religious inquiries, but gently prods him to see the beauty of the Hebrew Scriptures- even if he cannot agree with their morality. In his 1818 letter to his Jewish acquaintance, Mordechai Manuel Noah, he expressly says:
“ Let the Wits joke; the Phylosophers sneer.! What then? It has pleased the Providence of the first Cause, the Universal Cause, that Abraham should give Religion not only to Hebrews but to Christians and Mahomitans, the greatest Part of the modern civilized World.
I am, Sir, though a Stranger, with much Esteem, / your humble and obliged Servant
John Adams”
And in another letter to the same recipient in the following year:
“For as I believe the most enlighten’d men of it have participated in the ameliorations of the philosophy of the age, once restored to an independent government & no longer persecuted they would soon wear away some of the asperities & peculiarities of their character possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians for your Jehovah is our Jehovah & your God of Abraham Isaac & Jacob is our God I am Sir with respect & esteem / your obliged humble servant
John Adams”
Here we see that Adams appreciated Judaism as a foundation for his own religion (which he naturally viewed as superior), which he saw as a natural growth out of the honorable stock of Judaism - rather than a revolt against a hateful and oppressive system, as Jefferson did. He wished for Jews to be equal and free citizens in America on their own terms - not on the condition that they become more “enlightened” at some future day - and even for national rejuvenation of the Jews in our own homeland.
More expressly he wrote in 1809:
“We may be reduced to hard Necessities. The two most powerful active and enterprizing Nations that ever existed are now contending with Us. The two Nations to whom Mankind are under more obligations for the Progress of Science and Civilization, than to any others except the Hebrews. This consideration affects me more than the danger from either or both.
I excepted the Hebrews, for in Spite of Bolingbroke and Voltaire I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize Men than any other Nation. If I were an Atheist and believed in blind eternal Fate, I should Still believe that Fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential Instrument for civilizing the Nations.
If I were an Atheist of the other Sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by Chance, I Should believe that Chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate, to all Mankind the Doctrine of a Supreme intelligent wise, almighty Sovereign of the Universe, which I believe to be the great essential Principle of all Morality and consequently of all Civilization.
I can't Say that I love the Jews very much neither. Nor the French nor the English nor the Romans nor the Greeks. We must love all Nations as well as We can, but it is very hard to love most of them."
In this light we can judge much better the distance between the liberal establishment of religion in New England and the radical disestablishment of Virginia.
The former was a measure advanced by a man with keen religious feelings and great love for the Biblical faiths practiced by most Americans to this day. He wished for religion to prosper as the basis of morality and civilization - and he was deeply grateful to the Judeo-Christian heritage, despite his disagreements and contentions with its traditional interpretation. In this sense he was closer to George Mason, who wished to separate church and State for the good of the church.
Indeed Thomas Jefferson was not truly representative of the widespread opinions amongst his contemporaries. This General Order issued by George Washington in 1779 may reflect it better:
“Head-Quarters Moore's House [West Point]
saturday Novr 27th [1779]
Parole Landaff.
C. Signs Lexington Leeds.
The Honorable Congress has been pleased to pass the following proclamation.
Whereas it becomes us humbly to approach Almighty God with gratitude and praise for the wonders which His goodness has wrought in conducting our forefathers to this western world—protecting them and their posterity & raising us their children from deep distress to be numbered among the Nations of the Earth—for arming the hands of just and mighty Princes in our deliverance and especially that he has been pleased to grant us health and plenty—hath prospered our Arms and those of our Ally—shielded our troops in the hour of danger and led them to Victory—that he went forth with them against the savage tribes—stayed the hand of the spoiler and turned back his mediated destruction—that He hath prospered our commerce, given success to those who have fought the enemy on the face of the deep, and above all that He hath diffused the glorious light of the Gospel;
Therefore Resolved—That it be recommended to the several States to appoint thursday the ninth of December next to be a day of public and solemn Thanksgiving to Almighty God for His mercies and of prayer for the continuance of His favor & protection to these United States—to beseech His gracious influence on our public councils—that He would go forth with our hosts and crown our arms with victory—grant the plentiful effusions of divine grace to His Church—bless and prosper the means of education and spread the light of Christianity through the Earth—that He would crown the labor of his people with plenty—that He would take into his holy protection our illustrious Ally—give him Victory over his enemies and render him signally great as the father of his people and the Protector of the rights of Mankind—that He would be graciously pleased to turn the hearts of our enemies and dispense the blessings of peace to contending Nations—that He would in mercy pardon our sins and receive us into His favor and finally that He would establish the Independence of these United-States upon the basis of religion and virtue and support and protect them in the enjoyment of Peace, Liberty & Safety.
A strict observance to be paid by the Army to this proclamation and the Chaplains are to prepare and deliver discourses suitable to it”.
The ending sentence, which is Washington’s own composition and order rather than the language of the proclamation, shows that George Washington had no qualms about it. Furthermore, in the harsh winter of 1779, when he would be hard pressed to lead his into their winter encampment in Morristown, New Jersey, Washington could have just ignored the proclamation if it was not to his liking.
In his 1790 general letter to Roman Catholics in America he wrote:
“I thank you, Gentlemen, for your kind concern for me. While my life and my health shall continue, in whatever situation I may he, it shall be my constant endeavour to justify the favourable sentiments which you are pleased to express of my conduct. And may the members of your Society in America, animated alone by the pure spirit of Christianity, and still conducting themselves as the faithful subjects of our free Government, enjoy every temporal and spiritual felicity.”
These are not the words of a hesitating Deist, but of a man convinced of the true and benevolent nature of his Christian faith - a nature he is so sure of, he, indeed, requires no support of government. While Jefferson had written “errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them” in bitter irony, the people who voted and embraced the Statute containing those lines accepted them plainly and enthusiastically - understanding them to mean that Truth is indeed great, and as they sincerely believed in the truth of their faith, they required no assistance in perpetuating it.
Conclusion: The State as a Spiritual Creature
States do not exist as material entities.
Like Constitutions, classes, churches and peoples, they are constructions of the mind - and they are not less real for it. When Aristotle called Man ζῷον πολιτικόν he meant it in both senses: Man is the political animal, but it is also the animal that lives in cities. Naturally the State seeks the support of all the other institutions generated by Society - but if the State’s natural urge for validation and support is not restrained, it ends up conquering and strangulating them.
We have started our discussion with the Feudal Order passing from this world and the Class that was its center passing with it - either going extinct or being assimilated into the new class structure of the early modern State.
We have seen how the early Modern States had first elevated a nobility of service, for the administration of the State apparatus and the military structure that had replaced the Feudal arrangement, but the decline of the seigneurial class was only the first part of it.
The other power structure which the State had to contend with was the newly resurgent and reunified Church - which had emerged from the chaos of the Medieval papal schisms with great potential to challenge the State. For that reason, the rulers of early modern States in Europe initially sought to placate the spiritual authority of the Church while limiting its temporal powers and possessions - often while employing high ranking prelates in the State apparatus.
But the Reformation crisis had changed all this. Now the Church (whether under the old Roman Catholic system or a new Protestant structure) required the protection of the State - which rendered it powerless to limit the latter’s power.
The State was now limited only by the passions of its own citizens. This group was selected from amongst the former subjects of the old Feudal monarchies to give the new State a base of support beyond the nobility of service. Since the main feature of this nobility was that it did not command great estates, large bodies of men and great treasures, but was capable only to handle the assets of the State, the State could not rely on it for more than being its leading subjects - which meant the State required to infuse at least a large enough constituency from amongst its subjects with passion and sense of ownership of the State to create a stable citizenry to support it.
In the great States of Western Europe, such selection was made on the basis of class - but not always the same class.
In Poland-Lithuania, the Szlachta were citizens, the peasants were serfs, everyone else - the Jews, the Cossacks, the urban Burgesses - had varying degrees of autonomy, but no actual share in government. In England, serfdom disappeared in the late Middle Ages and the government of the Crown in Parliament evolved into universal citizenship led by the knights of the Shire and the Burgesses- the class that would later become known more broadly as gentlemen. In France, the Nobility of Service was split between the hereditary fighting Nobility, which directly descended from the old Feudal one, and the Civil Service Nobility of the Robe which was elevated out of the Bourgeoisie - and for that, both nobles and burgesses had gained a place and share in government - first in the Estates General, but soon in the administrative work of absolute royal power upon the territory and inhabitants of France.
In Spain, however, the selection was made through religion.
In this land, which had seen seven and half centuries of struggle between states and alliances affiliated and distinguished by religion, the newly unified kingdoms of Castile and Aragon had decided to physically eject Jews and Muslims from the Spanish polity. The method of enforcement was brutal, cunning and imposed total government control over the Spanish Church, which while it remained nominally part of the Papal church hierarchy, was in effect cut off from his governing authority and delivered to the unified Spanish Crown.
In the New World, the patterns of the mother-countries repeated themselves.
The Spanish colonies were focused on conversion of the Natives- voluntary or otherwise. Once converted, the common Indians were subject to the authority of the Crown- delegated to a New World replica of the old Iberian nobility. Government was firmly in the hands of the Crown and its viceregal representatives.
In New France and the English Colonies, Old World patterns also persisted, but were also significantly altered.
The gentleman continued to dominate Anglo-American politics, but the farmers and artisans no longer were satisfied in being virtually represented by this class, but wished for actual voice in their government. When Parliament attempted to impose its authority over the colonies, it was reopening a dispute which in the eyes of the common American was already settled a century before.
The Virginia squire (actually, a planter) still dominated his surroundings, but he had no monopoly on power.
To gain a seat in the State or Federal legislature he actually had to court the vote of the common people of his district. Indeed the rise in industrialization and the diminishment in the relevant power of the Planter class with the emergence of a Virginian middle class akin to that of the North was the reason both to the relative hesitance of that State to secede from the Union (as the Middle Class’ interests were oppose to such a course of action) and the eventual decision to do so (as last attempt by the Planter class to fortify their power).
New England democratized early and thoroughly.
In essence, the decline of the Congregationalist Church in the 1760s with greater Imperial engagement following the Seven Years War - had diminished the only remaining sources of sharp distinction between people - property long being relatively equally distributed in Massachusetts and its daughter colonies. The main remaining distinction was that of education and reputation - and both could be acquired, especially due to the network of excellent public schools.
In the Middle Colonies - Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey - a truly plutocratic or proprietary class distinction existed, but as always, this sort of aristocracy by its very nature prepares the way to its replacement by a democracy.
New York landed estates were worked by tenant farmers - a remnant of the Dutch rule - but the main wealth of the State was in its trading port. Thus depriving the patroon families from achieving monopoly over New York politics. The best the Livingstons, the Morrises and the Schuylers could do was having an advantageous opening into politics and trade, competing against Manhattan merchants. A similar tension existed in Pennsylvania between the Proprietors - who long claimed even special constitutional privileges - and the Philadelphia merchants which, joining hands with the Scot-Irish small frontier farmers, defeated them in a silent revolution happening parallel to the national one. New Jersey, always a fertile land of small farms, had a class of freeholders - that is, landowners - which held a monopoly on political life until the beginning of the 19th century. However, unlike in Pennsylvania and the South, these were not domineering great landlords - but simply a wide class of middling farmers.
The common phenomenon in all the British colonies was the gradual abolition of outside controls and the establishment of true polities.
The New England republics had shed the yoke of their commercial company first- but even the private fief of Pennsylvania, the semi-commercial, semi-military enterprise of Virginia and the giant corrective facility that was Georgia would come to govern themselves by a legislative assembly and an executive. These freedoms, the struggle for which preceded independence and therefore are rarely thought of, were hard won and dear to the colonists, who rightly assessed that without them.they would have been reduced to a Spanish style rule by a class parallel to the voracious Peninsulares. Indeed, the line in the Declaration complaining of British officers swarming to the colonies to eat their substance had exactly this model of an empire in mind.
Westward expansion democratized America further.
Eastern States were forced to abolish property qualifications for the vote to retain their working population. But it was not from want of the vote that men left New England and Pennsylvania and founded Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. It was the desire to find one's own way in the world, to be one's own master and stand on one's own feet- within the bounds of a free society. The Southwest have been settled out of desire to join the planter class- but the Northwest was settled by men aspiring to be yeomen-farmers.
Just as in England, religious dissent was rife in every colony and even where the Church organization was most powerful, there was not much that could be done about it.
Further, the organization of the established Church of England was weakened on purpose by both imperial policy and local interests, and London was disinclined to empower any of the Separatist churches of New England. For a short period the Congregationalist Church was indistinguishable from the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony- while the latter was isolated and united. But the very principles of the Congregationalist Church created resentment, a well-read and spiritual population and modest wealth- all the elements required for dissenter sects to rise against it.
Thus were Religion, Class and the Law eliminated as crutches for the State. Therefore, in America, the State became a voluntary creature- a real life replica of the Lockean model.
It could not abuse the fractured religious life of Americans, their ad hoc class structures, or even ethnicity - in which they varied greatly within each colony and between it and all the others. The only basis of authority besides popular consent was allegiance to the British Crown, and once it was removed forever, there was a need to reintroduce the idea of Covenantal Government into the American bloodstream. It had existed before - but now it would reach its final form - no more a Covenant between two parties where one already owes the other service, such as Magna Charta, and merely seeks to renegotiate the terms under which it may be supplied, but a truly binding and eternal agreement, uniting diverse individuals into a single society.
