The Conclusion first assesses whether there is a unified history of religious toleration in colonial America to be told. There is not because the colonies were all too different. Next, the Conclusion discusses what the sum of the individual chapters of the book, by focusing on law, contributes to the historiography of colonial America. As this book has endeavored to demonstrate, important lessons about history—including about religious history—can be learned by spotlighting law, just as they can by concentrating on economics, politics, and the like.

Part I collects writings from Washington’s young manhood and early middle age, up to the time he became commander-in-chief of the American army. These materials reveal the public-spiritedness that was a constant throughout Washington’s life, but they also illustrate the most important change in its orientation. As a young man, Washington’s ambition sought distinction in the service of the Crown, while in his maturity that ambition was turned toward defending the rights of the rising American nation from the injustices that arose from British imperial rule.

This chapter explores the American Sons of Liberty as the first modern social movement. Contesting Parliament’s Stamp Act of 1765, colonists across the British possessions mobilized angry protests and – even more consequently – affiliated through correspondence and deputations to create a new sort of alliance. For the first time, societies openly affiliated in pursuit of a common political objective. The repeal of the Stamp Act just months later, as the American movement won sympathy and respect in Britain, demonstrated the measure’s efficacy, and the Sons’ model would soon be called upon again.

This chapter examines the influence of Magna Carta on the development of rights and liberties in the Anglo-American common law tradition. Originally issued by King John of England in 1215, Magna Carta and several later medieval sources set forth numerous prototypical rights and liberties that helped to shape subsequent legal developments in England, America, and the broader Commonwealth. Magna Carta inspired sixteenth-century Puritan dissenters in Elizabethan England and seventeenth-century English jurists like Sir Edward Coke and Puritan pamphleteers like John Lilburne, who advocated sweeping new rights reforms on the strength of the Charter. Magna Carta also inspired more directly the new bills of rights and liberties of several American colonies, including notably the expansive 1641 Body of Liberties of Massachusetts crafted by Nathaniel Ward, and many of the rights provisions in the American Declaration of Independence, the original state constitutions, and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

This chapter examines the influence of Magna Carta on the development of rights and liberties in the Anglo-American common law tradition. Originally issued by King John of England in 1215, Magna Carta and several later medieval sources set forth numerous prototypical rights and liberties that helped to shape subsequent legal developments in England, America, and the broader Commonwealth. Magna Carta inspired sixteenth-century Puritan dissenters in Elizabethan England and seventeenth-century English jurists like Sir Edward Coke and Puritan pamphleteers like John Lilburne, who advocated sweeping new rights reforms on the strength of the Charter. Magna Carta also inspired more directly the new bills of rights and liberties of several American colonies, including notably the expansive 1641 Body of Liberties of Massachusetts crafted by Nathaniel Ward, and many of the rights provisions in the American Declaration of Independence, the original state constitutions, and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.B1:L8

The introduction explains the global-historical, interdisciplinary, and historiographical importance of this topic; sketches the history of decision-making in popular assemblies prior to the seventeenth century; and describes how the book will conceptualize and measure consensual and majoritarian forms of decision-making in the English House of Commons and the colonial lower assemblies. Majority decision-making is taken to be either natural or automatic in politics. This is short-sighted. The dominance of majority decision-making as a global standard for political decision-making is therefore something to be explained, not assumed. It is impossible, therefore, properly to address the promise and pitfalls of majority rule today without a history of its rise at the ready. This book is the first such history. It describes and explains the crucial moment in the majority’s global rise to power: its embrace by the elected assemblies of Britain and America in the age of the English, Glorious, and American Revolutions.

This chapter describes and explains the emergence of majoritarian decision-making in twenty-seven lower colonial assemblies in Ireland, mainland North America, and the Caribbean between 1619 and 1776. It documents the peculiar conditions under which majoritarian politics developed in the colonies while also registering the importance of attempts to imitate parliamentary practices. Colonial lower assemblies were created under conditions fundamentally different from those that prevailed in the Westminster House of Commons. Some were part of corporations and proprietorships, not royal colonies; and some initially admitted all freemen, not simply elected representatives. These factors led to distinctive institutional trajectories. In general and over the long run, these factors appear to have reinforced a tendency for the colonial lower assemblies to be or become majoritarian. By scrutinizing the available evidence, one is left with the overwhelming impression of a total embrace of majoritarian politics before the American Revolution and, in most cases, long before that time. As the colonial lower assemblies of North America became provincial congresses and then state lower assemblies, they predictably continued their majoritarian practices. This pattern continued in the first intercolonial assemblies and in the US House of Representatives.

Founders of the earliest American colonies considered religious piety an essential civic virtue and therefore continued the tradition of religious establishment found in Britain and other Protestant countries. New sects and denominations (especially Quakers and Baptists) contended against Congregationalist and Anglican establishments throughout the colonies. Though prominent dissenters Roger Williams and William Penn founded colonies respecting religious liberty, the decline of religious establishment elsewhere was owed primarily to changes in British law, commercial and political expediencies necessary for increasingly diverse immigrant populations, and, in the case of Anglican establishments, the difficulty of securing ordination and a self-sustaining parish. Though Roman Catholics enjoyed some degree of toleration, enthusiastic Protestant identity on both sides of the Atlantic further reduced Catholic rights and liberties. Jews enjoyed some limited degree of toleration, but only in a handful of colonies.

Societies embracing religious liberty have been comparatively rare in human history. Political rulers possess strong incentives to control the spiritual marketplace, whereas the clergy of a dominant faith will seek state protection to prevent rival groups from challenging their hegemony. With a close affinity for church-state unity, why would any nation liberalize laws and allow greater freedoms for religious minorities? In contrast to explanations that focus on a shifting ideational landscape, this chapter argues that reasons for the rise of religious liberty can be found in the economic incentives facing political leaders. When deregulating the religious market enhances revenue collection, economic growth, and bolsters needed immigration, governments will reduce restrictions on religious minorities. Colonial America remained divided as to whether religious liberty was a good idea, but the economic necessities facing a new nation led to passage of the First Amendment.

This chapter examines the various philosophies of education familiar to the Founders. Specifically, it traces the influence of classical theorists like Plato and Aristotle as well as Enlightenment thinkers including Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. It reveals the Founders’ unique synthesis of these two strands of thought. In addition, the chapter surveys the state of education in Colonial America. It recounts the context in which the Founders themselves were educated, and notes the effect this context had on Thomas Jefferson’s early advocacy for a more accessible educational system in Virginia.