American Indian Lands Were Stolen--From Other Indians

If you go to "Native Land Digital," you will see a map of North America showing the lands claimed by indigenous peoples.  If you live in North America, you can locate your street address and identify the native American tribe that claims the land on which you reside.  If this makes you feel guilty, because you live on land that was stolen from indigenous people by European settler colonists, you might be receptive to the argument of postcolonial theorists who say that justice requires returning all of this land to its original indigenous owners.

But notice what is implicitly assumed in this map of "native land."  It is assumed that when the first European settlers arrived in the New World after Columbus's first contact in 1492, the boundaries for these native land claims had already been drawn up by the American Indians, and then the European settlers started to steal this land from the Indians.  And over the next 500 years, the Europeans stole almost all of that land in North America.

And yet as soon as you look into the history of the Native American tribes both before and after 1492, you realize that there is no historical truth to any of that.  The territorial boundaries between tribes were never fixed for very long because the tribes were often at war with one another, and when the losing tribes were conquered, they could lose their land to the conquerors. 

In his book The Wild Frontier: Atrocities During the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee (2000), William Osborn has an Appendix with a list of the "Intertribal Indian Wars" from the 1500s to the 1800s in the area that is now the continental United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  His list includes over 250 intertribal Indian wars for which there is some historical documentation. 

In many of these wars, land previously claimed by one tribe was conquered by another tribe.  For example, as I have indicated in a previous post, French explorers of Canada found that the four confederated Iroquoian-speaking tribes they called the Huron--who called themselves the Wendat--lived in settlements scattered across a peninsula located between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe northwest of Lake Ontario.  Some of these settlements had as many as 2,000 people.  The total population for about twenty settlements was about 30,000.  The larger settlements were surrounded by palisades to protect them from attack, because the Huron Confederacy was often at war with the Iroquois Confederacy of five tribes settled south of Lake Ontario.  Then in 1649, the Huron were devastated by an invasion of Iroquois warriors fighting with firearms acquired from trading with the Dutch colonists.  Those of the Huron who survived were forced to abandon their villages and leave their native territory.

So, if today you happen to own some land around the southern shore of Georgian Bay, the Native Land Digital map will tell you that your land was stolen by European settlers from the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) Confederacy.  But this doesn't tell you that the Iroquois had stolen it from the Huron in 1649.

Similarly, when Ben & Jerry's public relations division (on July 4, 2023) tweeted that Mount Rushmore should be given back to the Lakota Sioux Indians, as the first step towards returning all of the U.S. to its indigenous owners, Jeff Fynn-Paul pointed out the absurdity of such thinking in the light of the migratory history of the Sioux.  When European explorers first recorded the life of the Sioux in the mid-1600s, they were living around Lake Superior--a thousand miles east of the Black Hills.  They were forced to move westward when they were attacked by the Ojibwe and other indigenous tribes.  They then had to steal land from tribes such as the Kiowa who already occupied South Dakota.  Such intertribal warfare over land was part of the way of life of the indigenous tribes.

Moreover, as Fynn-Paul indicates. not only did the tribes steal land from one another, they also enslaved those individuals whom they captured in war.

In his book Not Stolen, Fynn-Paul has pointed to the fundamental mistake in all of this rhetoric of "settler colonialism"--the romantic Marxist myth of history as a continual conflict between the evil people who are the oppressors and the good people who are the innocent victims of oppression.   Near the opening of the Communist Manifesto, Marx declared:

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden now open fight."

In postcolonial theory, this view of history as a Manichaean battle between good and evil becomes the conflict between the wicked European colonizers who are the vicious oppressors and the virtuous indigenous people who are the innocent oppressed. To believe this, one must ignore the complexity of human history where real human beings act from mixed motives and fall into tragic conflicts where neither side in the conflict is purely good or purely evil.

The Darwinian Evolution of Indigenous Americans Through Genetic and Cultural Hybridization: Refuting the "American Genocide" Argument

Ever since the early 1990s, scholars of "post-colonial theory" or "settler colonialism" have asserted that beginning with Columbus landing in the New World, European settlers have been responsible for a deliberate and systematic campaign to kill the indigenous people of the Americas, which constitutes "American Genocide" or "American Holocaust" (Stannard 1992; Whitt and Clarke 2019).  The European settlers did this so that they could steal the land that had previously belonged to the Amerindians.  

As a consequence of this, you can now go to the website of the "Native Land Digital" and see how all the land that once belonged to the indigenous peoples of America is now claimed by European settlers.  You can also see how European settler colonialists stole the indigenous lands in Australia, New Zealand, and Israel.  (The identification of the Jews in Israel as settler colonialists explains the pro-Palestinian attacks on Israel.)  If you live somewhere in these parts of the world, you can type in your street address at the Native Land Digital and identify the indigenous tribes who owned the land that you have stolen.

Previously, I have written about how Charles Darwin on his trip on the Beagle saw the brutal consequences of European attacks on indigenous peoples in South America, New Zealand, and Australia:

"Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals--the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children."

Darwin seemed to see this as a vicious expression of the natural human propensity to tribalism or xenophobia.  Others have explained this as showing the natural desire for ethnic identity as rooted in our evolved human nature:  when people favor their ethnic or racial community over others, they are practicing an extended form of kin selection that advances their ethnic genetic interests.  We have evolved to like those who look like us, because groups of people that look similar share more genes with one another than other groups.  This has been part of the reasoning from the Alt-Right supporters of Donald Trump's program for mass deportations of illegal immigrants and closing the borders to the immigration of non-European people into the United States.

I have argued that while there is a natural desire for social membership, with symbolic cues for membership in a society, there is no evidence that this must be expressed as a natural desire for ethnic or racial identity in an ethnically and racially homogeneous society.  Human beings are happy to live in multiethnic and multiracial liberal societies.  

One can see this even in Trump's MAGA movement.  Far from promoting the ethnic identity of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, Trump has actively solicited and won the support of many Black males, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, and Catholics.  And in 2024, the most pro-Trump racial demographic was American Indians!  65% of American Indian voters voted for Trump as compared with 57% of whites for Trump.

So, 533 years after Columbus landed in the New World, there are still many descendants of the Indigenous Americans alive today.  Significantly, many if not most of them are genetic and cultural hybrids--genetic and cultural mixtures of Indigenous, European, and Black people.  This illustrates the Darwinian evolution of hybridization.  (This Darwinian hybridization includes the interbreeding of the Neanderthal and human species as recently as 45,000 years ago [Curry 2024; Gibbons 2024].)  This fact by itself refutes the claim that European settler colonialism in the Americas has been responsible for an "American Genocide."

In his book Not Stolen; The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, Jeff Fynn-Paul presents this as the demographic argument against the claim of genocide in the Americas.  Scholars disagree about the population of the Indigenous people in the New World in 1491.  But they agree that the two largest population centers were in areas of the great Aztec and Inca civilizations--central Mexico and greater Peru.

If you look at the Wikipedia article on "Ethnic Groups in Latin America," you will see that in Mexico (with a population of 127 million), 70% of the people are mestizos, 14% Amerindians, and 15% whites; in Peru (with a population of 34 million), 32% are mestizos, 45% Amerindians, and 12% whites; in Ecuador (with a population of 18 million), 41% are mestizos, 39% are Amerindians, and 10% whites.  When Columbus landed in the New World, 50% of the total population of Indigenous Americans was in the Aztec region, and 25% in the Inca region.  So, as we should expect, the great majority of the people in these two regions today are either pure Indigenous Americans or mestizos (mixtures of Indigneous and European people).

So, with as many as 150 million mestizos and Amerindians living where their Indigenous ancestors lived five hundred years ago in the Aztec and Inca regions, it's hard to see the "genocide" of one million dead claimed by Stannard and others.

In Canada, only about 5% of the population are Indigenous people; and in the United States, only a little over 1% are Indigenous.  But that's not surprising considering that in 1491, probably less than 12% of the total Indigenous population of the Americas was in what is now Canada and the U.S.  In these two areas, the low population of the Indigenous people has been overwhelmed by the large population of European immigrants.

What is most striking in all of this is the interracial mixing.  This is depicted in this painting.

                                                     A Casta Painting by Luis de Mena, 1750

Casta is Spanish for "caste" or "race."  In the early 18th century, "casta paintings" were popular in Mexico as studies of a mixed-race society (Deans-Smith 2005).  If you click on and enlarge the image above, you can see that the "Virgin of Guadalupe" (the Virgin Mary) stands over all the mixed-race couples as a vulvic symbol of the Mother of All.  Left of the Virgin Mary is the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, where this image of the Virgin Mary is enshrined.

The first couple is a well-dressed European woman standing next to her Indian husband wearing a loin cloth and carrying a bow.  The child is painted to resemble his father.  We also see a European man coupled with a well-dressed African woman, alongside their mixed-race child.  This is what I mean by genetic and cultural hybridization.

Here the cultural hybridization is depicted by the mixture of clothing styles.  But another example of cultural hybridization is in the traditions of holidays.  In Mexico, for instance, the Day of the Dead is a vestige of Aztec religion, and it is celebrated on the evenings of November 1 and 2, which coincides with All Soul's Day in the Catholic calendar.  So, this holiday fuses Catholic and Indigenous religious practices.

I have previously written about another image of racial and cultural hybridization in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which appears in the Museum as part of the Darwinian evolutionary story of multiethnic and multiracial humanity in Mexico.  The idealized female body in the middle represents the racial and cultural hybridization of the human species:

But even if this shows the genetic and cultural survival of Indigenous people in the New World, it is true that probably over 90% of the original Amerindian population died from the infectious diseases introduced by the Europeans--such as smallpox, measles, and typhoid.  But this was not intended by the Europeans, and so it does not count as "genocide," which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationality, etc., with the intention of partially or wholly destroying that group."  Of course, the word "genocide" was first used in 1944-1945 as a term for what German Nazi leaders did in trying to exterminate Jews and other disfavored groups.  There is no evidence that the Europeans had any such deliberate and systematic policy for murdering Indigenous Americans.

We are left with Fynn-Paul's conclusion that "the Americas today are simply teeming with the descendants of the Indigenous people who were alive in 1491," and therefore "Europeans did not slaughter or displace the great majority of Indigenous people of the New World" (41-42).

REFERENCES

Curry, Andrew. 2024. "Study Reveals Kinship Among First Modern Humans in Europe." Science 386: 1207.

Deans-Smith, Susan. 2005. "Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in Eighteenth-Century Mexico and Spain." Colonial Latin American Review 14: 169-204.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. 2023. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World. New York: Bombardier Books.

Gibbons, Ann. 2024. "Neanderthals and Moderns Mingled Early and Often." Science 384: 132-133.

Stannard, David. 1992. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Whitt, Laurelyn, and Alan W. Clarke. 2019. North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Locke's Secret Writing on Slavery: Brewer Versus Armitage on the "Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina"

 Anyone who studies closely the life and writings of John Locke will notice that he was a remarkably secretive person.

Maurice Cranston began his biography of Locke by observing:  "Locke is an elusive subject for a biographer because he was an extremely secretive man.  He modified a system of shorthand for the purposes of concealment; he employed all sorts of curious little cyphers; he cut signatures and other identifiable names from letters he preserved; at one time he used invisible ink" (Cranston 1957: xi).

Peter Laslett began his edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government in a similar way by noticing Locke's strange obsession with concealing his authorship of his writings:

"'Property I have nowhere found more clearly explained, than in a book entitled, Two Treatises of Government.'  This remark was made by John Locke in 1703, not much more than a year before he died.  It must be a rare thing for an author to recommend one of his own works as a guide to a young gentleman anxious to acquire 'an insight into the constitution of the government, and real interest of his country.'  It must be even rarer for a man who was prepared to do this, to range his own book alongside Aristotle's Politics and Hooker's Eccesiastical Polity, to write as if the work were written by somebody else, somebody whom he did not know.  Perhaps it is unique in a private letter to a relative [the Rev. Richard King].  What could possibly be the point of concealing this thing, from a man who probably knew it already?" (Locke 1988: 3).

The best answer to Laslett's question here is that Locke feared persecution if he stated too openly views that would shock the popular prejudices of his day, and therefore he had to engage in secret writing that would conceal his unpopular thoughts from most of his readers.  That Locke himself saw the need to do this is suggested in some of his remarks in his private notebooks that he never intended to be published. 

For example, in an early entry in his Journal (1678), he copied this sentence from a French treatise he was reading: "The popular mind takes offense at everything that conflicts with its prejudices."  He then wrote this annotation: "One ought to take care therefore in all discourses, whether narrative of matter of fact, instructive to teach any doctrine, or persuasive, to take care of shocking the received opinions of those one has to do with, whether true or false."  This was published for the first time in 1830 in Peter King's Life of John Locke (1:227-28).

Locke's concern "to take care of shocking the received opinions" of his readers would explain why he never resolved the obvious contradiction between his apparent acceptance of slavery and his teaching about human equality in natural rights.  As I argued some years ago, Locke had to engage in secret writing to convey to his careful readers his opposition to slavery as unjust oppression, but without explicitly saying so, and thus hiding this from those many readers of his time who would be shocked by this denial of their "received opinions" about the justice of slavery.

And yet, some scholars--such as David Armitage (2004)--have claimed that Locke's role in helping to write and edit the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina shows his active endorsement of African slavery in the Province of Carolina.  But now, we have Holly Brewer's new article that argues that Armitage's reading of the manuscript evidence for the composition of the various versions of the Fundamental Constitutions is mistaken, and that Locke was not actively involved in writing the provisions supporting slavery.

Here is the map for the Province of Carolina, 1663-1729, and the Provinces of North Carolina and South Carolina, 1729-1776.  You might need to click onto the map to enlarge it.

In 1663, Anthony Ashley Cooper (later the First Earl of Shaftesbury) and seven other Lords Proprietors were given "absolute power and authority" over Carolina in a royal charter by Charles II.  This royal grant of power and authority was reiterated in a second charter of 1665 when the territorial reach of Carolina was extended further north and south along the Atlantic Coast, and westward across the continent to the Pacific Ocean.  Ashley became the leader of the Carolina project.

In 1666, Locke became Ashley's personal secretary; and, in 1668, he became the Secretary of the Lords Proprietors, a post that he would hold until 1675.  Years later, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the installation of King William and Queen Mary, Ashley would appoint Locke as the secretary of the new Council of Trade and Plantations.

In 1669, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina established the governmental and social order of Carolina.  The was actually the first of five Fundamental Constitutions--the others were issued in 1670, in January of 1682, in August of 1682, and the last in 1698.  For a long time, it was thought that Locke was the primary author of the Fundamental Constitutions.  But now most scholars agree that Locke was only one of many secretaries who wrote or edited these documents; and ultimately the final acceptance of these documents depended on the approval of the Lords Proprietors.

Since the Fundamental Constitutions asserted not only the "absolute power and authority" of the Lords Proprietors over Carolina but also the "absolute power and authority" of Carolina's slave masters over their African slaves, this seemed to contradict the liberalism of Locke's Two Treatises.  But now the "postcolonial" scholarship that has emerged over the past forty years teaches that there is no contradiction here because what we see here is, as Armitage has said, "a mutually constitutive relationship between liberalism and colonialism" (602).  Read in the light of the colonial context manifest in the Fundamental Constitutions, we can see that Locke's Two Treatises were written to justify the absolute power of proprietary lords over their colonies and of colonial settlers over their African slaves and over the Native Americans who would be dispossessed of their lands.

Of all the evidence for this conclusion that Armitage finds in the Fundamental Constitutions, the most dramatic is the "most notorious article"--article 101 of the 1669 version--"Every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute <power and> Authority over his Negro slaves of what opinion or Religion soever."  Armitage explains: "Though none of his later detractors could have known it, Locke himself had augmented the slaveholders' 'absolute Authority' by adding that '<power and>' in the 1669 manuscript now among the Shaftesbury papers."  And we know that because that insertion of "power and" is in Locke's handwriting (Armitage 2004:609).

Brewer develops various arguments against Armitage's "postcolonial" interpretation of Locke's involvement with the Fundamental Constitutions.  Her most important argument is that Locke did not in fact add the words "power &" to the sentence about the absolute power and authority of masters over Negro slaves in the Fundamental Constitutions manuscript.

Armitage's concern is with Locke's contributions to the version of the Fundamental Constitutions between the first signed document (signed July 21, 1669) and the second signed document (signed Mar 1, 1670).  Armitage claims that Locke was responsible for inserting those two key words--"power &"--to a sentence about the Freeman's "absolute Authority over his Negro slaves."  But if you look at the handwritten manuscript and compare it with other examples of Locke's handwriting using the words "power &," you can see that the "power &" in the Fundamental Constitutions manuscript is not Locke's handwriting.  Brewer reproduces photographs of the texts in her article (pages 16-19), so that her readers can judge this for themselves.  Locke's handwriting does appear in some other places in this manuscript, but his additions have nothing to do with slavery.  (As far as I know, Armitage has not disputed Brewer's claim here by asserting that the words "power &" really are in Locke's handwriting.)

This is consistent with my claim that Locke opposed slavery although he thought he could not say this openly without offending the supporters of slavery.  He did not try to strike out the articles supporting slavery in the Fundamental Constitutions, but neither did he add any language strengthening the document's endorsement of slavery.

Armitage makes further claims about Locke's involvement in the revising of the Fundamental Constitutions in 1782.  He says that "all" of Locke's revisions were accepted, and that the article about the absolute power and authority of masters over slaves "went untouched in the 1682 revisions even as Locke renumbered it with the rest" (Armitage 2004: 615, 619).

This is a crucial point for Armitage's postcolonial interpretation of Locke's Two Treatises because scholars believe that Locke was writing the Two Treatises in 1682 (although it was not published until 1689), and therefore we can see that Locke was continuing to support the slavery article of the Fundamental Constitutions in 1782 just as he was writing the Two Treatises.

But Brewer points out that Armitage ignores the fact that the article about the absolute power of masters over slaves is missing from the Fundamental Constitutions manuscript of August 17, 1682, which was signed and sealed by the Lords Proprietors.  There is no record to explain how or why this happened.  But then the article about absolute power over slaves returned in the final version of 1698 after being absent for sixteen years.  The reason for the article's reappearance in 1698 is no clearer than its disappearance in 1682.

Did someone involved in editing the 1682 document quietly remove the slavery article, hoping that the Lords Proprietors would sign the document without noticing the absence of this article?  Could Locke have done this?  We don't know.  But it's something we might expect if Locke wanted to subvert the practice of slavery in Carolina but without being noticed.

On the other hand, if Armitage is right about Locke's enthusiastic support for slavery, we might expect that Locke would have become a slaveholder himself.  After all, Armitage notes that the Proprietors rewarded Locke for his work on the Fundamental Constitutions by making him a "landgrave" of Carolina, which was a title of nobility.  If he had acted on the privileges to which he was entitled as a landgrave, Locke could have claimed 12,000 acres of land in Carolina, and he could have purchased slaves to work that land for him.  Other landgraves, including those who were not residing in Carolina, did this.  But amazingly, as Brewer points out, Locke never did this, and Armitage is silent about this.

Apparently, Locke had no desire to become a slaveholding land baron in Carolina.  Perhaps because he really did believe what he declared in the first sentence of his Two Treatises:  "Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for't."

REFERENCES

Armitage, David. 2004. "John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government." Political Theory 32 (October): 602-627.

Brewer, Holly. 2024. "Whose Fundamental Constitutions? Locke, Slavery, and Manuscript Evidence." Locke Studies. Volume 2024: 1-57.

Cranston, Maurice. 1957. John Locke: A Biography. London: Longmans, Green and Co.

King, Lord Peter. 1830. The Life of John Locke. 2 volumes. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley.

Locke, John. 1988.  Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Rise and Fall of Theocracy in Illiberal America: John Winthrop Versus Roger Williams, 1631-1833

Who was the First Founding Father of America?  

Some scholars say it was John Winthrop, who led the Puritan founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630--the "shining city on a hill" and all that (Bremer 2003).

Others say it was Roger Williams, who founded the city of Providence (later incorporated into Rhode Island) in 1637 (Johnson 2015).

There is some truth in both claims.  But we should see that the Puritan theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first founding of illiberal America, while the establishment of religious liberty and separation of church and state in Providence was the first founding of liberal America.

We should also see that the liberal America of Williams eventually prevailed over the illiberal America of Winthrop.  Because while the legacy of Puritan theocracy has dwindled to almost nothing today, the principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state established by Williams have been foundational for American political culture.  

When these principles are combined with freedom of speech and of the press in the First Amendment, this establishes liberal America as an open society with freedom of thought and speech that allows for the free pursuit of both philosophic or scientific understanding and religious experience, with an open debate over reason versus revelation. 

In his book Illiberal America, Steven Hahn rightly begins his history of illiberal America with Winthrop and the theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (49-63).  But then he passes over Williams in four sentences (54, 60, 63, 70), and he does not allow his reader to see how in the debate between Winthrop's illiberal America and Williams' liberal America, Williams' arguments eventually (over 200 years) prevailed.

This sets the pattern for Hahn's rhetorical strategy throughout his book.  He moves through nine periods of American history from the early 17th century to the present.  For each period, he shows the emergence of some illiberal tradition of American history.  But then he obscures the fact that each of these illiberal traditions has either been utterly defeated or seriously weakened by the success of liberalism.  Hahn's deceptive rhetorical strategy then allows him to mistakenly claim that today Donald Trump and his MAGA movement manifest the triumphant convergence of all of America's illiberal traditions.

BANISHMENT FROM MASSACHUSETTS AND THE FOUNDING OF PROVIDENCE

Over the years, I have written a series of posts arguing that Roger Williams was right about the Biblical basis for religious liberty and the separation of church and state, and that John Locke's defense of religious toleration largely coincides with Williams' reasoning.  Although there is no clear evidence that Locke ever read Williams, their arguments are so similar that Locke's writing on toleration can be considered a vehicle for the transmission of Williams' view of religious liberty (Johnson 2015: 345-373).  Thus, Williams and Locke jointly contributed to the American liberal tradition of freedom of conscience.

This all began in 1631, when Williams and his wife sailed from England to Boston, where the Puritans had already established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1830 with John Winthrop as Governor.  Winthrop recorded the event in his journal and identified Williams as "a godly minister."  But then Winthrop quickly discovered that he and Williams disagreed about the fundamental principles of religious life and political order.

This became clear when Williams refused an offer to join the Congregationalist (Calvinist) church in Boston and become its minister because the church maintained its ties to the Church of England, and as a radical "Separationist," Williams believed that each church must be a self-governing association of voluntary members who are not under the authority of any ecclesiastical hierarchy.  Williams also denied the authority of the theocratic government of Massachusetts to coercively enforce the First Table of the Ten Commandments--the religious commandments to worship God, to avoid worshipping false gods, and to observe the Sabbath.  Williams argued that the power of the civil magistrates extends only to the "outward goods" of worldly life--one's property and bodily security--and not to the "inward goods" of one's spiritual life--one's religious beliefs and practices.  He also refused to take any of the oaths required by the Massachusetts Bay Colony because while he accepted religious oaths taken voluntarily, he rejected oaths enforced by legal coercion as taking God's name in vain.  A fourth point of disagreement was that Williams challenged the right of the colonists to the lands taken from the American Indians under the grant of the English king, because Williams argued that these lands could not be rightly taken without the consent of the Native Americans.

In 1635, Williams was brought up for trial and charged with "apostasy" and "heresy."  He was convicted, and his punishment was banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  

Williams and his family travelled for many weeks in a harsh winter through the New England wilderness.  Because of his friendships with Native Americans, they fed and sheltered him.  Finally, he reached the Narragansett Bay area, where he was welcomed by the Native American peoples.  He negotiated with them to obtain the land for his new settlement that he called "Providence."

On August 20, 1637, Williams and 12 other people who had followed him to Providence signed the "Providence Agreement":

"We whose names are hereunder, desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active and passive obedience to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for the public good of the body in an orderly way, by the major consent of present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together in a Towne fellowship, and others whom shey shall admit unto them only in civil things" (Lutz 1998: 162).

This is the beginning of Liberal America.  Previously, Puritan settlers in America had signed "covenants" in which they took an oath "in the presence of God and one another" to combine themselves into a civil polity "for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian Faith" (Mayflower Compact).  But notice that in this Providence Agreement, they make a "promise" rather than an oath, God is not mentioned, and they submit themselves to the political body "only in civil things"--not in spiritual things.  This was the first founding in America of government by the consent of the governed with a separation of church and state.

Prior to the Revolution, most of the American colonies--with the exception of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania--had established churches supported by the government with various kinds of coercive persecution of religious dissenters.  That began to change after 1776, as the states moved away from illiberal theocracy towards liberal toleration.

 

DISESTABLISHMENT IN VIRGINIA

In Virginia, the established church was the Anglican Church (the Church of England) of Virginia, which became the Episcopal Church after the Revolution.  Religious dissenters--such as the Baptists--were persecuted.  Baptist preachers were often imprisoned because of their religion.  They could be punished for publicly expressing their religious beliefs or for refusing to pay the taxes for supporting the established church.  Baptist preachers like Isaac Backus and John Leland preserved the legacy of Roger Williams by arguing for religious liberty in Virginia, and they were influential with Virginia political leaders like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

On June 12, 1776, the Virginia Constitutional Convention adopted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was written by George Mason.  The last section of that document affirmed religious liberty:

"That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other" (Art. 16).

Although this echoes some of the language of Williams about religious liberty, it still suggests some blending of religion and the state that Williams would have rejected.  First, it uses religious language--"our Creator" and "Christian forbearance"--that suggests a governmental endorsement of Christian theism.  Second, it does not clearly condemn the legal establishment of religion; and in fact, it was not interpreted as challenging the existence of the established church in Virginia.

Madison was a delegate at the Virginia Convention.  And he proposed alternative language for this section on religious liberty: "all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience; and therefore that no man or class of men ought, on account of religion to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges; nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities" (Johnson 2015, 267; Madison 1962, 1:170-75).  The Convention rejected this language, presumably because this would have abolished the legal privileges of the established church in Virginia. 

The opening sections of the Virginia Declaration of Rights ("that all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights . . .) influenced Jefferson in writing the opening sections of the Declaration of Independence.  But Jefferson's Declaration says nothing about religious liberty.  It does recognize, however, "certain unalienable rights" that include "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  Williams had argued that religious liberty was one of those unalienable rights:

"Truth.  Kings and Magistrates must be considered (as formerly) invested with no more power than the people betrust them with."

"But no people can betrust them with any spirituall power in matters of worship, but only with a Civill power belonging to their goods and bodies" (BT, 418).

Indicating their agreement with Williams, Madison and Jefferson attacked the establishment of a state-supported church in Virginia as a violation of the unalienable natural right to religious liberty.  Their arguments were set forth in Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments" and Jefferson's "Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty."  Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" was a written petition opposing a bill introduced in the Virginia General Assembly in 1784 and 1785 that would have required the people of Virginia to pay an annual tax "for the support of the Christian religion or of some Christian church."  Jefferson first proposed his "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom" in 1779, but it was not ratified until 1786 (Johnson 2015, 273-79).

All of their arguments can be found in the writings of Williams.  For example, Madison repeated Williams' claim that the New Testament shows that the early Christian churches were voluntary associations that did not depend on the support of human laws, because the spiritual kingdom of God was separated from the earthly kingdom of the world.  Ecclesiastical establishments supported by human laws began with the Roman Emperor Constantine, over three hundred years after the first Christian churches (Madison 1973, 12).  

Madison also agreed with Williams in arguing that not only did the Christian religion not depend on the support of human laws, but the civil government did not depend on an established religion, because as Williams indicated, the "civil peace" of a political community did not depend on the "spiritual peace" of a true church.  After all, native Americans and pagans have kept the peace of their communities without belonging to the true church of God (BT, 72-73).  Here Williams agreed with Pierre Bayle that a society of atheists could live together in a peaceful social order based on their natural moral sense without any religious beliefs.

When the Virginia General Assembly ratified Jefferson's "Statute of Religious Liberty" on January 16, 1786, that effectively ended the legal establishment of religion in Virginia.

MADISON, THE GODLESS CONSTITUTION, AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

The United States Constitution as ratified in 1789 and as amended in 1791 supports religious liberty and the separation of church and state in three ways.  First, unlike most of the state constitutions, the national Constitution is literally "godless" in that it says nothing about any divine being, which suggests that the national government does not need the support of a national religion.  Second, there is the provision in Article V of the Constitution that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."  The third way is the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

All of the state constitutions except for Virginia and New York had religious tests for their public officers.  For example, the members of the Pennsylvania state legislature had to swear an oath: "I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration."

In the ratifying debates on the Constitution, the "no religious test" clause was criticized.  One speaker at the Massachusetts ratifying convention warned that no religious tests "would admit deists, atheists, etc., into the general government; and, people being apt to imitate the examples of the court, these principles would be disseminated, and, of course, a corruption of morals ensue."

This shows the primary reason why people wanted religious tests and the legal establishment of religion--without religion, there would be a "corruption of morals."  That's why any proponent of religious liberty had to argue, as Williams did, that the "civil peace" of a community could be sustained by a natural moral sense without any particular religious belief.  One can be good without God.

Apparently, this argument for "no religious test" was successful because all of the states with religious tests abolished them during the founding period.

Similarly, the Constitution's silence about God provoked a debate that continues up to today.  Some of the people who want to identify America as a "Christian nation" have said that the Constitution needs a "God Amendment."  The most prominent example of this movement to put God into the Constitution was the National Reform Association that emerged during and after the American Civil War.  This was a movement of evangelical Protestant ministers, theologians, academics, lawyers, and judges, who claimed that the Civil War was God's punishment of America for having a godless Constitution, and that this showed the need for amending the Constitution.  

They proposed an amended version of the Preamble to the Constitution--with the new language in italics:

"We the People of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, his revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America" (National Reform Association 1874, p. 7).

Beginning in 1864, the NRA formally petitioned President Lincoln and the Congress of the United States to support this amendment to the Constitution.  The leaders of the NRA argued that they were not proposing an established church or a merging of church and state.  Rather, they were proposing a constitutional recognition of the fact that America was a Christian nation, and this could be done without denying religious liberty and the separation of church and state.  But they failed to persuade President Lincoln or the Congress to take their proposed amendment seriously.

Their claim that their proposed amendment of the Preamble would not violate the First Amendment was not plausible.  The Constitution requires that all the officers "both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution" (Art. VI).  How could anyone who was not a Christian believer honestly pledge to "support this Constitution" if the Preamble affirmed "the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations"?  Surely, a constitutional declaration that the United States has "a Christian government" would violate the First Amendment's prohibition on any law "respecting an establishment of religion."

That these proposals for a "Christian Amendment" of the Constitution have never succeeded confirms the triumph in America of Williams' argument for a "wall of separation" between church and state.  Moreover, there is some evidence that the critical turning point in this historical triumph of Williams over Winthrop--the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 and the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791--would not have happened without the influence of Williams' ideas on some Baptist preachers in Virginia.

The devotion of some Virginia Baptists to Williams' conception of religious liberty--and particularly the devotion of one Baptist preacher, John Leland--was crucial for James Madison's elections to the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788 and to the First Congress in 1789.  If Madison had not been at the Virginia convention, it is likely that Virginia would not have ratified the Constitution, and that would have swayed other states against ratification.  If Madison had not been elected to the First Congress, it is unlikely that there would have been any other member of Congress willing to vigorously argue for the Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution (Scarberry 2009).

Madison's home was in Virginia was in Orange County.  The election for Orange County's two delegates to the ratifying convention was set for March 24, 1788.  Many of Madison's friends urged him to stand for election.  Initially, he declined, but he finally changed his mind and decided to run.  And yet he had reason to believe that he would lose the election.  There were many Baptists in Orange County, led by the popular Baptist preacher John Leland, who opposed the Constitution because they did not think it went far enough to secure religious liberty.  They liked the "no religious test" clause.  But they wanted an explicit declaration that religious liberty was a natural right.  They agreed with Patrick Henry that the Constitution should not be ratified so long as it had no Bill of Rights.

Madison met with Leland, and he persuaded Leland that he should support Madison's election with the promise from Madison that he would promote constitutional amendments for a Bill of Rights in the First Congress.  Madison then won the election.

At the Virginia ratifying convention in June, Madison faced the eloquent opposition of Patrick Henry and George Mason, who argued that the Constitution should not be ratified without a Bill of Rights.  Madison responded by insisting that if the Constitution was ratified, the new Congress would seriously consider amending the Constitution to include a Bill of Rights.  Madison's argument carried the day: the Virginia convention ratified the Constitution by a vote of 89 to 79.  Since Virginia was the largest state in both population and territory, it is unlikely that other states would have ratified the Constitution without Virginia's ratification.

Then, in 1789, as Madison stood for election to the new House of Representatives, he once again needed the votes of Baptists who doubted his commitment to a Bill of Rights.  And once again he persuaded Leland and other Baptists that as a congressman, he would push for a Bill of Rights.  He won the election by 336 votes--1,308 to 972--in a district that had been gerrymandered to be heavily antifederalist.  Then, once in Congress, Madison led the movement for a Bill of Rights--against stiff opposition both in the House and the Senate.  It was ratified by the necessary number of states on December 15, 1991.

So, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that the "no religious test" test clause in the Constitution and the freedom of religion clauses of the First Amendment would not have become the law of the land without the political support for Madison from the Virginia Baptist followers of Roger Williams.

But even so, Madison's original proposal for amending the Constitution to protect religious liberty was not completely successful.  Because originally he wanted a clause that would secure religious liberty from infringement by the state governments.  His preferred language was "No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases."  But the final language of the First Amendment was only directed against congressional legislation: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ."

This implied that state governments were free to legislate an establishment of religion or prohibit the free exercise of religion.  Indeed, some state governments did just that.  It wasn't until 1940 that the U. S. Supreme Court held that the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment (Cantwell v. Connecticut).  And in 1947, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment also incorporated the Establishment Clause as applied to the states (Everson v. Board of Education).

 

DISESTABLISHMENT IN MASSACHUSETTS

Taxpayer funding of particular Christian denominations was common in the American colonies.  But after 1776, only four New England states--Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut--continued to do this.  By 1833, even these four states had rejected this policy.

In Massachusetts, the debate over the public funding of churches began at the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1780 (Witte and Latterell 2019).  In the Constitution of 1780, the language about the ceremonial and moral roles of religion evoked little controversy.  So, for example, the Preamble affirmed "the people of Massachusetts, acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the goodness of the Great Legislator of the Universe," and "devoutly imploring His direction in so interesting a design."  And Article 2 declared that "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."  Most of the delegates did not object to this language.

But it was the institutional establishment of religion in Article 3--particularly, compulsory religious taxes "for the support and maintenance of public protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality"--that stirred intense controversy.

This debate over religious taxes continued for over fifty years.  Finally, in 1833, the critics of religious taxes who wanted a complete separation of church and state that would foster "pure and undefiled religion" prevailed by passing the Eleventh Amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution, which made church membership and funding entirely voluntary.

Thus, the theocratic legacy of John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony came to an end, as it was defeated the liberal legacy of Roger Williams' Providence Colony.   

FREE ARGUMENT AND DEBATE IN A LIBERAL OPEN SOCIETY

In his "Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty," Jefferson argued that securing religious liberty frees the mind by recognizing "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" (Jefferson 1984, 346-48).

Thus, perhaps for the first time in human history, an open society was emerging in liberal America--and later in Scotland, England, and a few other places where the liberal social order was spreading--where freedom of thought and speech about the reason/revelation debate, and about the place of the human mind in the universe, was possible.  

The best sign that this was happening was that sometime after 1800, esoteric writing was no longer considered necessary or desirable, because the natural desire of philosophers or scientists for intellectual understanding was no longer seen as a subversive threat to the natural desire of many other human beings for religious experience.  Philosophers and scientists no longer needed to hide their true thoughts in secret writing and speech for fear that they would be persecuted for writing or speaking openly and sincerely.

That was the ultimate triumph of "free argument and debate" in Roger Williams' liberal America.

REFERENCES

Bremer, Francis J. 2003. John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Hahn, Steven.  2024.  Illiberal America: A History.  New York: Norton.

Johnson, Alan E. 2015. The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience. Pittsburgh, PA: Philosophia Publications.

Lutz, Donald S., ed. 1998.  Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Madison, James. 1962. The Papers of James Madison. Vol. 1. Edited by William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Madison, James. 1973. The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison. Edited by Marvin Meyers. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

National Reform Association. 1874. Proceedings of the Fifth National Reform Convention To Aid in Maintaining the Christian Features of the American Government, and Securing a Religious Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Held in Pittsburg, February 4, 5, 1874, With a History of the Origin and Progress of the Movement.  Philadelphia: Christian Statesman Association.

Scarberry, Mark S.  2009.  "John Leland and James Madison: Religious Influence on the Ratification of the Constitution and on the Proposal of the Bill of Rights."  Penn State Law Review 113: 733-800.

Williams, Roger. 1963. The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. Vol. 3: Bloody Tenent of Persecution.  Edited by Samuel L. Caldwell.  New York: Russell and Russell.

Witte, John, and Justin Latterell. 2019. "The Last American Establishment: Massachusetts, 1780-1833.  In Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan Den Hartog, eds., Religious Dissent and Disestablishment: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833, 399-424. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.