Resistance and Its Cost

In certain progressive circles the word “Resistance” is worn like a badge of honor. It conjures images of heroic defiance, moral courage, and standing against power. Yet for most who claim it, the reality is far lighter: marching with friends, carrying signs, posting statements, and returning home the same evening. It is a romantic notion—an emotionally satisfying idea of heroism that costs very little. It is not Tiananmen Square. And it is certainly not the far harder act that many of the people we call Founders actually performed: leaving the known world behind, setting foot in an untamed and often hostile place, and attempting to build a new order from almost nothing.

It is easy to judge 18th-century revolutionaries by 21st-century standards. It is harder, and more honest, to ask what kind of world they were walking away from, and what it actually cost them to try something new.

Modern criticism sometimes speaks as if the Founders stand among history’s worst offenders. The charge rarely survives contact with the wider 18th-century world. Absolute monarchy, rigid caste, state-enforced religious conformity, and hereditary bondage were the global norm, not the American exception. The men who designed the new republic left serious moral failures in place. They did not, however, create a system more oppressive than the ones they left behind. The distance between those older orders and the framework they attempted to build remains one of the central facts of the story.

1. The Long Arc of Revolution: From Early Settlers to 1776

A common misconception is that the American Revolution began spontaneously in 1776 in a room in Philadelphia. In reality, the political and spiritual experiment had been brewing for over a century, driven by early colonial pioneers and visionary leaders of faith.

Long before Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, figures like William Penn were laying the groundwork for radical self-governance. In 1681, Penn established Pennsylvania as a “Holy Experiment”—a haven founded on Quaker principles of religious tolerance, pacifism, and fairer treatment of Native peoples. His Frame of Government explicitly protected freedom of conscience and introduced concepts of constitutional limits on power that later influenced the U.S. Constitution.

Early colonial settlers from various dissent-minded traditions—Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, and Huguenots—fled European tyranny specifically to build communities where individual conscience reigned supreme over kingly decrees. By 1776, the Founding Fathers were not inventing a desire for liberty from scratch; they were codifying a 150-year-old tradition of colonial self-reliance, local assembly, and spiritual independence.

2. The Spiritual Roots of Liberty: The Reformation, Awakening, and a Wider Christian Foundation

The language of 1776—asserting that rights are “unalienable” and endowed by a “Creator”—grew directly out of major religious transformations that reshaped Western thought.

The Protestant Reformation (1517–1648) introduced the radical concept of the “priesthood of all believers.” By translating the Bible into common languages, it asserted that the individual conscience answers directly to God without requiring a priest or monarch as intermediary. If an individual could question the supreme authority of the Church in matters of the soul, it was only a matter of time before they questioned the supreme authority of a king in matters of state.

A generation before the Revolution, the First Great Awakening (1730s–1740s) swept the 13 colonies. Jonathan Edwards provided its deepest theological foundation, emphasizing personal conversion, the sovereignty of God, and the equal dignity of every soul before the Creator. The itinerant preaching of George Whitefield carried that message across colonial boundaries in massive open-air gatherings that reached people of every rank, including many Black listeners. These revivals helped create the first shared, continent-wide cultural experience in America and united disparate colonies under a common identity of spiritual self-determination.

John Witherspoon, Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), stands as the most direct clerical link to the founding itself. The only active clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, Witherspoon trained a generation of leaders and insisted that true liberty of conscience must extend into the political realm.

The spiritual landscape was broader still. Black Christians shaped it in powerful ways. Lemuel Haynes, a free Black Revolutionary War veteran, became the first African American ordained as a Congregational minister in America and pastored white congregations for decades. In 1776 he wrote Liberty Further Extended, a direct response to the Declaration of Independence that applied its own language to argue that slavery violated the natural rights the Patriots claimed for themselves. Preachers such as George Liele planted early Black Baptist congregations under conditions of severe restriction.

Women contributed as well, though often outside formal pulpits. The most striking example is Phillis Wheatley. Born in West Africa around 1753 and brought to Boston as an enslaved child, Wheatley received an unusual education in the Wheatley household and quickly displayed extraordinary literary gifts. In 1773 she published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral—the first book of poetry by an African American and one of the earliest volumes by any woman in the colonies.

Her verse was deeply Christian. She wrote elegies, meditations on Scripture, and reflections on divine providence, often blending classical learning with evangelical piety. One of her most widely circulated early poems was the 1770 elegy on the death of George Whitefield, which helped establish her reputation across the Atlantic. In it she portrayed Whitefield as a messenger of salvation whose gospel reached “Africans” as fully as anyone else—an implicit claim of spiritual equality that challenged the racial assumptions of her time.

Wheatley’s poetry also engaged the political moment. In 1775 she addressed a poem to George Washington, praising the Patriot cause and imagining a future of liberty under his leadership. Washington received the poem graciously and invited her to visit him at his Cambridge headquarters. Her work was read, debated, and sometimes weaponized: admirers pointed to her classical allusions and theological sophistication as proof of Black intellectual capacity, while others struggled to reconcile her gifts with the system that had enslaved her. She was emancipated around the time her book appeared, yet her later years were marked by hardship. Still, her poetry remained a living argument that the same God who endowed “all men” with unalienable rights had also gifted an African woman with the power of refined and public speech.

English hymns by writers such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley filled colonial churches, while smaller communities—including the women of the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania—composed original sacred music. Christianity itself was not new to the African continent. Centuries before the American Revolution—and long before Protestantism existed—vibrant Christian kingdoms flourished in Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Kongo. Many captive Africans brought an established Christian faith with them across the Atlantic. They quickly recognized the hypocrisy of selective “plantation theology,” rejected commands of servitude, and used the Exodus narrative to power their own spiritual and physical struggle for liberation.

Together these voices helped create a religious culture that prized individual conscience before God. That culture did not automatically produce political equality, but it supplied moral language and spiritual energy that later generations would use to expand the meaning of liberty.

3. The World They Were Breaking Away From

Understanding the deep religious and political desire for freedom requires looking at the brutal geopolitical baseline of the 18th century:

Absolute Monarchy and Divine Right: Power was inherited, absolute, and unchecked. Kings could seize property, imprison dissenters without trial, and demand total obedience.

Rigid Feudal Castes: European society was strictly stratified. Social mobility was virtually impossible; commoners carried the financial burdens of royal empires while holding no political voice.

The Global Baseline of Slavery: In the 1700s, human bondage was a ubiquitous global reality practiced across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Within landed colonial society—North and South alike—owning slaves was as integrated into daily economic life as owning real estate or employing labor is today.

When the Founders declared that government derives its legitimacy solely from the consent of the governed, it was an explosive rejection of thousands of years of human autocracy.

4. Who Were These Men? Meritocracy, Wealth, and Global Prejudices

Stripping away two centuries of romanticized mythology reveals that the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia were not hereditary lords—in fact, they were locked out of European nobility by birth. Instead, they were educated merchants, lawyers, physicians, and self-made landowners. They represented an educated meritocracy that directly challenged the rigid feudal structures of Great Britain and Holland, where real power belonged strictly to the landed gentry.

Benjamin Franklin left school at age ten, worked as a printer’s apprentice, and taught himself literature, science, and philosophy.

Alexander Hamilton was an orphaned clerk from the Caribbean who rose through sheer intellect and community support.

Roger Sherman, co-drafter of the Declaration and Constitution, began his career as a cobbler before teaching himself law.

Yet these educated leaders still operated within a global worldview deeply shaped by centuries of European prejudice. The ideological roots of racial and religious “othering”—which gained terrifying momentum during the Spanish Inquisitions by targeting Moors, Jews, and later Protestants—had established a tragic global baseline: non-European populations, including Africans, Indigenous Americans, and Asian cultures, were broadly viewed by European powers as inferior or less than human.

Furthermore, chattel slavery was legally recognized across all 13 colonies prior to the Revolution. Enslaved people made up significant populations in Northern hubs like New York City and coastal Rhode Island. Northern Founders—including Franklin in Pennsylvania and John Jay in New York—owned household slaves for decades. New England ports, ships, and financial institutions built immense wealth transporting enslaved captives and processing slave-produced commodities like sugar and tobacco.

The men in the room were not representative of the average colonial resident. They were a small, highly educated, and relatively wealthy minority in a country overwhelmingly made up of small farmers, tradesmen, indentured servants, and enslaved people. Property requirements for voting further restricted participation even among free white men.

5. Property by Law: Women, Coverture, and Unofficial Influence

A critical element of the era’s legal reality was the status of women. Under the prevailing doctrine of coverture—inherited from English common law—a married woman had no independent legal identity. By law, her rights were subsumed into those of her husband. She could not own property in her own name, keep her own earned wages, sign contracts, or vote.

Despite this systemic legal erasure, the intellectual environment surrounding the Revolution was heavily influenced by brilliant women operating through political writing, strategic counsel, and diplomacy.

Abigail Adams was John Adams’s key political advisor. In her famous March 31, 1776 letter, she urged him to “Remember the Ladies” when drafting new laws, warning that women would not hold themselves bound by a government in which they had no voice—directly applying the Patriots’ own anti-tyranny arguments to gender and legal coverture.

Mercy Otis Warren published sharp political satires that rallied revolutionary support, later authoring a landmark three-volume history of the Revolution and passionately advocating for the Bill of Rights. Dolly Madison and Martha Washington established norms of social diplomacy, using political gatherings to broker bipartisan compromises in the fragile new nation.

6. Static Monuments vs. Evolving Men: The Capacity for Growth

Perhaps the greatest flaw in modern debates is viewing the Founders as morally static figures who never changed. In reality, the very principles of the Revolution forced several leaders to confront their own hypocrisies.

Benjamin Franklin went from owning household slaves and publishing auction ads in his early newspaper to serving as President of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1787. His final public act before dying in 1790 was petitioning Congress for the national abolition of slavery and an end to the slave trade.

John Jay, despite owning enslaved people earlier in his career, helped found the New York Manumission Society and, as governor, signed the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in 1799, putting New York on the path toward emancipation (though the process remained gradual and incomplete for decades).

By the late 1790s, the generation that led the Revolution was actively debating, evolving, and in some cases laying the legal groundwork to dismantle institutions they had inherited.

7. Bound Labor Across the Atlantic: Indenture vs. Chattel Slavery

The history of colonial labor also included hundreds of thousands of white Europeans who arrived not as free settlers, but as indentured servants or convict laborers shipped from Britain and Ireland.

Bound to 4-to-14-year contracts, white servants were bought, sold, disciplined, and worked under harsh taskmasters. Many did not survive their terms. Those who did earned their freedom “the hard way,” often receiving modest “freedom dues.”

The crucial legal distinction remains: while white servitude was temporary and contractual, Black chattel slavery was legally established as permanent, hereditary, and property-based. Children of indentured servants were born free; children of enslaved women inherited lifetime servitude under the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem.

Traditionalists highlight that hardship and unfree labor were widespread across early American populations, emphasizing the grit of working-class settlers. Progressives note that colonial elites deliberately transitioned from white indentured servitude toward racialized chattel slavery in the late 1600s (especially after events like Bacon’s Rebellion) to divide the labor force—ensuring that white servants eventually gained full civil rights while Black Americans were locked into permanent, generational bondage.

8. The Core Debate: How Modern Perspectives Clash

When progressives and traditionalists clash over the Founders today, they are highlighting different facets of this multi-layered history.

The Progressive Critique: Structural Harm and Lasting Exclusion From a progressive lens, personal growth and historical context do not erase the severe human cost. Figures like Jefferson wrote about universal liberty while continuing to enslave hundreds of people to maintain their wealth and status. Despite the contributions of figures like Abigail Adams and Phillis Wheatley, the legal framework of 1787 intentionally excluded women through coverture while denying basic rights to Indigenous populations and Black Americans. Mechanisms such as the Electoral College, equal state representation in the Senate, and life-tenured judges are viewed as 18th-century compromises designed to limit direct democracy—structures that continue to enable minority rule and block popular reforms today.

The Traditional View: A Revolutionary Baseline and Tools for Progress From a traditional or incrementalist perspective, the achievement lies in the unprecedented trajectory established. Breaking away from monarchical tyranny to build a self-governing republic based on an educated meritocracy rather than hereditary birthright was a monumental leap forward. By enshrining the concept that “all men are created equal,” the Founders gave future civil rights leaders—from Frederick Douglass and the Suffragettes to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—the moral vocabulary to demand equal rights. The evolution of leaders like Franklin and Jay, alongside the arguments of Black Christians such as Lemuel Haynes and the poetic witness of Phillis Wheatley, demonstrates that the Revolutionary spirit was designed for continuous self-improvement through the Constitutional amendment process.

9. Finding Common Ground: Bridging the Divide

The friction in these debates often comes from talking past one another: one side focuses on the severity of the original failures, while the other focuses on the radical potential of the breakthrough.

To foster a more constructive conversation, consider these points of convergence:

Acknowledge the century-long struggle: Recognize that 1776 was the culmination of a long tradition of spiritual and political resistance that included William Penn, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, John Witherspoon, Lemuel Haynes, Phillis Wheatley, and many others.

Recognize human complexity: Resist treating the Founders as either flawless heroes or irredeemable villains. They were flawed, self-interested, and often hypocritical men of their era who were also capable of brilliant political design, deep philosophical courage, and personal moral growth.

Embrace “a more perfect Union”: The Constitution’s Preamble inherently admits that the starting line was imperfect. American history is not a story of static perfection achieved in 1787; it is an ongoing, hard-fought struggle to broaden the circle of liberty and live up to the foundational promise of equality.

The Bottom Line: History does not require us to choose between blind hero-worship or total condemnation. By understanding the long arc of religious liberty—shaped by figures as different as Jonathan Edwards, Lemuel Haynes, and Phillis Wheatley—the legal realities of coverture and bound labor, the oppressive world the Founders fled, their capacity to change, and the real human cost of their compromises, we can cultivate a richer, more honest relationship with our past—and with each other.

The American Revolution was not a simple contest between Christian liberty and unbelief, or between the godly and the godless. Devout, theologically serious men fought and died on opposite sides, each convinced that faithfulness to God required the course he had chosen.

On the Patriot side, large numbers of believing men from Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist backgrounds served in the Continental Army and the militias. In New England especially, the culture of the meetinghouse shaped the ranks. Soldiers marched under officers and chaplains who treated the war as a matter of both political right and Christian duty. George Washington himself repeatedly called his men to live as “Christian soldiers” and ordered observance of religious discipline in camp. Men such as Lemuel Haynes fought as soldiers before they preached as ministers. For many of these men, resistance to what they saw as tyranny was an act of conscience before God.

On the Loyalist side, equally sincere Christians reached the opposite conclusion. One of the clearest examples is Moses Dunbar of Waterbury, Connecticut. A layman who had moved from Congregationalism to the Church of England, Dunbar concluded that taking up arms against the King was neither necessary nor lawful. He accepted a captain’s commission in a British regiment. Captured while visiting his home, he was tried by a Patriot court and sentenced to hang. The day before his execution he wrote a long “Last Speech and Dying Words” that was explicitly Christian in tone, explaining his political decision as a matter of conscience and committing his soul to God. Other Loyalist soldiers and officers, particularly among Anglicans in New York and the middle colonies, likewise understood obedience to the established government as a Christian obligation grounded in passages such as Romans 13.

This reality forces a harder historical honesty. Sincere believers, reading the same Bible and praying to the same God, took up arms against one another. The war cannot be reduced to a clean morality play in which one side owned Christian fidelity and the other did not. Conscience cut in both directions. The cost of acting on that conscience was not theoretical. It was measured in blood, exile, and the gallows.

Yet the framework that emerged from that conflict did not remain the possession of one religious tradition. Though its deepest roots were Christian, the principles of personal liberty, limited government, and freedom of conscience have protected Americans of every faith and of none. They have also given hope far beyond American borders to people who long for the same freedom to live, worship, and speak according to conscience. The unfinished work of liberty remains a human inheritance, not a sectarian one.

— Whit Boone