Essay 1-B: The Declaration of Independence, the Lockean Idea and Reverend Thomas Hooker

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

 

As the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence approaches, it is fitting to reflect on beginnings, in particular the beginnings of this beginning. The story of liberty in America does not begin with the Declaration of Independence. Rather, one may fairly say the Declaration is an end of a beginning.

So basic to the American story are the ideas of the Declaration that their emergence from the committee of Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston expresses an ethos that by 1776 colonial Americans had already made second nature. The rest of the world needed to hear—”a decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” as the Declaration put it—what Americans had long known by heart.

The Pilgrims who would depart Amsterdam for the New World aboard the Mayflower were Separatists. They had separated themselves—declared their independence, so to speak—from the ecclesiastical authority of the Church of England. They would discover the terms of their election to salvation by the election of their ministers.

The opinion of the Pilgrims about their ecclesiastical independence carried with it, in simple form, the fundamental ideas of consent Jefferson later set down in the Declaration. 

In the hold of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims expressed this idea of consent when they penned and signed the Mayflower Compact.

As subjects of the “dread sovereign Lord King James,” the Pilgrims agreed to

“Combine ourselves together into a civil body politick.”

And they further agreed to 

“…enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices from time to time as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony…” [emphasis added]

The Pilgrims consented to the authority of this “civil body politick” with the words

“…unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.”

A decade later the Puritans of the Winthrop Fleet followed. In the hold of the Arbella, John Winthrop gave his famous City on a Hill sermon, saying, “[W]e must be knit together…in brotherly affection…” or “[w]e shall be made a story and a by-word.” 

Eight years following the arrival of the Winthrop Fleet, Reverend Thomas Hooker turned his attention to a government for the settlements on the Connecticut River. In a sermon, Reverend Hooker would examine the Book of Deuteronomy, drawing on John Calvin’s commentaries thereon.

“Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you” (Deuteronomy 1:13, KJV).

Hooker preached that by the word “take,” he meant “elect,” a reflection of the Calvinist idea of election to salvation and the practice of electing ministers. This is located in the instruction of the Old Testament, a divine maxim that the people’s free consent must serve as the foundation of a just and successful government.

From this principle, in 1639, Reverend Hooker would help draft and obtain assent for the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a constitution for the government of the people inhabiting towns along the Connecticut River, such as Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford.

Unlike the Mayflower Compact eighteen years prior, the Fundamental Orders omitted any mention of the authority of a sovereign king. The drafters needed none if the free consent of the people was sufficient to found a government.

“Well knowing where a people are gathered together, the word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union of such a people there should be an orderly and decent Government established according to God…[we] do therefore associate and conjoin ourselves to be as one Public State or Commonwealth.”

Out of many, one state was created by, of all things, votes. So cherished was this idea of a charter in Connecticut that when Governor Andros sought to revoke the charter in 1687 without the consent of the people of Connecticut, colonists doused the lights, ran off with their charter, and hid it in a giant white oak, known today as The Charter Oak.

While the concepts of the Declaration are often attributed to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Thomas Hobbes did not publish Leviathan until 1651. John Locke, whom political scientists often over-credit with the ideas of the American Founding, was a tender seven years old at the time Hooker put this first consent-based constitution into practice. 

President Calvin Coolidge observed one hundred years ago, in his famous speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, that Hooker’s doctrine 

“…found wide acceptance among the nonconformist clergy who later made up the Congregational Church. The great apostle of this movement was the Rev. John Wise, of Massachusetts. …”

Coolidge went on to say, 

“[The thought of Hooker and Wise] was carried on with a missionary spirit which did not fail to reach the Scotch-Irish of North Carolina, showing its influence by significantly making that Colony the first to give instructions to its delegates looking to independence. This preaching reached the neighborhood of Thomas Jefferson, who acknowledged that his ‘best ideas of democracy’ had been secured at church meetings.”

The Pilgrims thus carried with them, in rough draft, the concepts that would become the Declaration of Independence, and in just eighteen years Reverend Thomas Hooker would put them into practice, establishing as, scholar Vernon Parrington put it, “a plan of popular government so broadly democratic.” 

 

Eric Wise is a partner in the Finance & Restructuring group of King & Spalding, resident in the New York office.

Click here to receive our Daily 90-Day Study Essay emailed directly to your inbox.

Click here for the essay schedule with today’s essay and previously published essays hyperlinked.