He then goes on to enumerate the groups: New England, with its Puritan English ancestry and its agriculture and fishing; the South, with its English Episcopalians, its aristocratic ideals, its plantation life; the piedmont country, with its independent small farmers and self-governing townships; and in between the commercial valleys of the Hudson, the Delaware and the Susquehanna. These again had their local differences of character:
[62]The Hudson had been settled by the Dutch, although many English, New Englanders, Germans and others had mixed with them. The Delaware region was largely occupied by English and German Quakers. The Susquehanna Valley contained a large proportion of Germans, still using their native tongue, and also many Scotch, Irish and English. There existed well defined interests, the mercantile, the agricultural; the German, the Dutch and the Quakers; the city, the country.
Beyond all these was the frontier, with its own natural conditions, type of inhabitants, and economic problems, a democratic community separate from all the rest.
The Constitutional convention of 1787 in Philadelphia was typical of this situation. Every problem found divergent interests and opinions; every solution was effected by compromise. [63]There was state jealousy of all central authority; the opposition between large and small states; that between the industries of the north and the agriculture of the south; the slave trade, with its complex of moral and economic problems; the sectionalism of the settled east and the frontier west; the protection of the property-holding class and the satisfaction of the radicals with their demand for liberty and equality. Every one of these conflicts had to be settled if possible, or at least (as with slavery) brought to a temporary status to avoid sharp struggle. There were, of course, certain unifying factors. The majority of the settlers were English, and most of these Protestants. The non-English speaking elements were very largely of Teutonic blood and Protestant religion also. There was a common political experience, and a democratic urge typical of the frontier. Most important of all, there was an eight-year war fought together against a common enemy and under the same Commander-in-Chief. The American government, then, with its new Constitution, was not a simple unity from the outset. It was rather a highly complex unity, containing within itself many minor groups, many different viewpoints, and many integrations of the sub-group for the benefit of the nation as a whole.
2.
An interesting illustration of this, and for our purpose a crucial one, is in the religious life of the thirteen original states. Before the Revolution, the states might be divided into four groups as regards their religious organization: there were congregational establishments in Massachusetts and Plymouth, New Haven, Connecticut, and New Hampshire; Church of England establishments in Virginia and the two Carolinas; four states formerly under various regimes had had the Church of England forced on them—Maryland, at first under Catholic rule, but with freedom of residence for all Christians; New York and New Jersey, which had been dominated by the Dutch Reformed Church; and Georgia, founded with almost complete religious liberty. Only three states had no established church—Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and its offshoot, Delaware. Of these last, Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams in 1636, under the radical, not to say revolutionary principle of complete separation of church and state, with right of residence and citizenship for all persons, even including Jews and atheists. Pennsylvania, chartered in 1681, was founded by William Penn, the Quaker, with liberty of residence for all “believers in Almighty God”; but the English government insisted on the condition that all voters and office holders “shall be such as profess faith in Jesus Christ” and the Protestant religion. What the new nation had, then, was not religious liberty, but rather a clash of many different points of view.
[64]Massachusetts set up its theocratic state with its chief interest in the Church; Virginia established its civil state, with the church as a subject member; while Rhode Island boldly denied the purposes and premises of both, placing an impassable gulf between the State and the Church and relegating to the individual conscience and to voluntary association all concern and action touching the Church and religious matters.
What, then, should be the upshot of this confusion of religious groups, with their ancient hatreds and prejudices, ingrown with history and overlaid with former strife and martyrdom? It was obviously impossible to make the United States Calvinist or Episcopal; it was necessary to have some sacrifice of each for the good of all. But it might have been possible to make the nation Protestant Christian, as was actually the case with the state of New Hampshire until 1877. Various minor causes here entered in. Warfare with England meant some opposition, at least, to the Church of England. The distance from the actual seat of old-world struggles, the character of the colonists and their longing for every type of freedom, helped much. The new theories of the French Encyclopedists, as adopted by Jefferson, certainly had great influence. But most important of all was the existence of the many minor sects, with the few important ones, of which all longed to rule but none wished to be dominated by any other.
The upshot was religious freedom, the separation of church and state, according to Article VI, Section 3, of the Federal Constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” This clause was opposed on both sides—by Massachusetts as being too liberal, by Virginia and Rhode Island as not liberal enough. Virginia had two years before this overthrown her state church and given complete freedom of conscience—not toleration—to all her people. The opposition even to toleration was becoming crystallized in the words of Thomas Paine: “Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance, but the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.” So the first amendment to the Constitution, adopted immediately afterward by motion of the first Congress, and by the required two-thirds of the states, was: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
This was tremendously significant of the growing and newly conscious group mind of the United States of America. It was equally important for the future of the nation and its unity in days to come. Religious liberty was not a matter of doctrine in its inception; it was the product of the birth and development of the group mind of the nation. It meant the relinquishment of the racial habits, of the state laws, of the old urge to persecute (common to almost every group, even those who were themselves refugees from persecution), and the adoption of a national standard to which every state, every church and every sect should bring its sacrifice. And if this sacrifice was not of their own right to live, but only of the right to make others miserable, it was nevertheless the sacrifice of something so important that the demand had convulsed France, Germany and England not many years before. Religious liberty, indeed, however firmly based on law and political ideals, never became the habit of thought and action which intolerance had been. A recurrent phenomenon of American life has been the breaking up into religious, racial and sectional groups, with a further synthesis of Americanization, through some common interest to unite them. The conflict among the many groups prior to the adoption of the Constitution, and its solution in that document with its Bill of Rights, has been paralleled at least four times from that period to the present day.