DeYoung on Presbyterians and 1776

· Tim Hopper

Ahead of the country’s 250th birthday, Kevin DeYoung taught a two-part combined Sunday school class at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, NC, on the role Presbyterians played in the American Revolution. As DeYoung puts it, “of all the religious groups, Presbyterians played the essential role in the revolution in this country.”

The first lecture, “The Mad Men and Ministers of Mecklenburg County,” is a local history: the Scots-Irish migration from Ulster to the Carolina backcountry, the seven sister Presbyterian churches around Charlotte, and the fiery Covenanter pastor Alexander Craighead, who was preaching independence from England as early as 1743. By 1775, 70% of Mecklenburg County belonged to one of Craighead’s churches, and though Mecklenburg held just 3% of North Carolina’s population, it supplied a quarter of the colony’s soldiers.

The second, “Declaring Independence from Great Britain,” weighs the evidence for and against the disputed Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20, 1775, then walks briskly through the twelve Presbyterian signers of the national Declaration in Philadelphia: Witherspoon, Benjamin Rush, Richard Stockton, James Wilson, and the rest. DeYoung’s case for why Presbyterians were almost uniformly for independence: a polity already shaped for representative government, a long memory of being dissenters under Anglican establishment, and a conviction that civil liberty and religious liberty stand or fall together.

A few of the contemporary verdicts DeYoung gathers are worth pulling out:

  • King George III called it “a Presbyterian war.”
  • A Hessian captain in 1778: “Call this war whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion. It is nothing more or less than a Scots-Irish rebellion.”
  • Cornwallis, on his reception in Charlotte: “the hornet’s nest of America.”
  • And the 19th-century historian George Bancroft: “The first voice publicly raised in America to dissolve all connection with Great Britain came not from the Puritans of New England, nor the Dutch of New York, nor the planters of Virginia, but from Scots-Irish Presbyterians.”