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Robert Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1-19. See also Conrad Cherry, God's New
Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971); Russell E. Richey and Donald
G. Jones, eds., American Civil Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil
Religion in a Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975); Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980); Leroy Rouner, ed., Civil Religion and Political Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame, 1986).
See the extraordinary treatise by Hiram Caton, The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, 1600-1835 (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1988). Inspired by J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine
Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1975), Caton traces the evolution
of what he calls "polytechnic rationality" in Protestantism, capitalism, the scientific spirit, and the representative governments
of the Dutch United Provinces after 1581, the British Whig ascendancy after 1688, and the United States after 1776.
On the four spirits of English expansion, see McDougall, Freedom Just around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828
(New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 17-37.
On the American Revolution as a holy war, see McDougall, Freedom Just around the Corner, 202-38.
In New England, the "black regiment" of clergy led by Jonathan Mayhew preached political resistance as a religious duty. In
New Jersey, Princeton's president John Witherspoon persuaded students like James Madison that the American cause was
sacred to the Lord. In Richmond, Patrick Henry declared, "There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations; and
who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us," before concluding, "Give me liberty or give me death." In Philadelphia,
the Continental Congress called the colonists to penitence, prayer, and fasting, and resolved in March 1776 "that it may
please the Lord of Hosts, the God of America, to animate our officers and soldiers with invincible fortitude . . . that a spirit
of incorruptible patriotism and undefiled religion may universally prevail." Down in South Carolina, Judge William Henry
Drayton expressed that mythic and mystic spirit of 1776 when he declared the colonists' miraculous fortitude, long-suffering,
self-denial, and success in battle proved that the Lord of Hosts fought alongside them. Conor Cruise O'Brien, God Land:
Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1988), 29; Hezekiah Niles, ed., Principles and
Acts of the Revolution in America (1822), cited in Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American
Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1976), 140.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (New York: Penguin, 2004 [1776]), quotation from 13. For a brilliant analysis of Paine's
rhetoric, see Robert A. Ferguson, "The Commonalities of Common Sense," William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 3 (July 2000):
465-504.
John T. Noonan Jr., The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia, 1998).
Ellis M. West, "A Proposed Neutral Definition of Civil Religion," Journal of Church and State 22, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 23-40
(39).
Richard W. Van Alstyne, Genesis of American Nationalism (Waltham, MA: Blaisdell Publishing, 1970), 3-57.
James G. Wilson, The Imperial Republic: A Structural History of American Constitutionalism from the Colonial Era to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 1-9. When the Founders casually boasted that America was or
would become a great empire, what they had in mind was not even remotely akin to the global alliances and foreign military
deployments the United States has engaged in since 1941. The word empire meant one of three things in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. The obvious first meaning was autocratic rule by a capricious emperor who crushed the liberties
of his subjects and exploited them in pursuit of power and glory. Americans abominated that sort of empire. A second usage
connoted a vast region larger than the typical European kingdom and singled out for some characteristic. That is the sense in
which Jefferson spoke of an Empire of Liberty. The third meaning of empire in Early Modern English, however, connoted a
very specific legal identity: utter, untrammeled sovereignty. When Henry VIII broke with the papacy, he bade Parliament to
pass a formal statute declaring "this realm of England is an Empire," meaning a realm subject to no superior authority, either
temporal or spiritual, on the face of the earth. As William Blackstone explained in his famous Commentaries on the Laws of
England, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979), 1:235, the words empire or imperial as used by Parliament simply
means that the English king "owes no kind of subjection to any other potentate on earth." The Founders and constitutional
Framers assuredly understood that when Congress broke away from the English Crown, it was declaring the United States to
be an empire in the sense of "utterly sovereign."
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=367; emphasis added and English standardized.
Ryan J. Barilleaux, "Foreign Policy and the First Commander in Chief," in Gary L. Gregg II and Matthew Spalding, eds.,
Patriot Sage: George Washington and the American Political Tradition (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), 141-64. In the same
volume, Virginia L. Arbery, "Washington's Farewell Address and the Form of the American Regime, 199-216, demonstrates
how faithful he was to the Publian model of government as described by Publius in The Federalist Papers.
Forrest McDonald, The American Presidency: An Intellectual History (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994), 9. See also
Walter A. McDougall, "The Constitutional History of U.S. Foreign Policy: 222 Years in the Twilight Zone" at: https://www.
fpri.org/docs/McDougall.ConstitutionalHistoryUSForeignPolicy.pdf.
The contrast with Jacobinism is elaborated by Claes G. Ryn, America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for
Empire (Transaction, 2003). Needless to say, the classic contrast between the ideologies of the American and French revolu-
tions is Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). My own understanding of the intellectual origins of
American constitutional thought rests on classic historical accounts including J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:
Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Bernard
Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1992); Jack N. Rakove, Original
Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1996); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of
the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo
Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985); Richard R. Beeman, Plain,
Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2009), and my own Freedom Just around the
Corner.
David Gray Adler and Larry N. George, The Constitution and the Conduct of American Foreign Policy (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1996), x.
Conventional wisdom holds that besides the personal passages, the Farewell Address was drafted mostly by Hamilton. In
May 1796 the president sent him an earlier draft composed in tandem with James Madison with permission "to throw the
whole into a different form." See Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 123-36. But recently John Lamberton Harper, Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of
U.S. Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and O'Brien, First in Peace, 161-67, have argued that
Washington was the principal author. Hamilton's main contribution, writes Harper, was to incline the text "toward a prudent,
realistic recognition of America's long-term inseparability from the European state system that it otherwise would not have

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Modern Age - Fall 2014

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