Republicans Resurrected: Memories of the English Civil War and Peaceful Transatlantic Resistance in the Beginning Of The American Revolution (1762–1765)

Abstract

At the inception of the American Revolution a transatlantic network of Real Whig Dissenters worked tirelessly to prevent what they understood to be the resurgence of seventeenth-century tyranny. For this group, religion and politics were so intertwined that a threat to one posed a threat to the other. However, recent scholarship has underestimated the importance of religion as a leading cause of the American Revolution by diminishing the civil significance of the Bishop Controversy and downplaying the religious implications of civil policies such as the Sugar and Stamp Acts. Drawing from a rich collection of manuscripts from this transatlantic network, this paper not only shows that the Bishop Controversy had civil significance, but that Dissenters viewed imperial fiscal policy through a religious lens. This transatlantic group included John Adams, Jonathan Mayhew, and William Allen in the American colonies and Thomas Hollis, Catharine Macaulay, Micaiah Towgood, and William Harris in Great Britain. They mobilized memories of religious oppression in the seventeenth-century to forge a common identity for British subjects, and some even attempted to influence public opinion by writing histories of England. Appropriating memories of the battles Britons fought to secure religious and political rights in the seventeenth-century, Real Whig Dissenters argued that the Bishop Controversy and the Sugar Act marked the beginning of a new age of a transatlantic imperial tyranny that must be resisted at all costs.