Perspective #91
‘The Wretched Refuse of Your Teeming Shore’: America 250
This is the second in my ‘US-250’ series of Perspectives essays. I’ll have more as the summer progresses. Today, I consider the spiritual climate of the colonies as a context for the people to decide between joining the revolution, staying loyal to Britain, or just watching to see what would happen.
Thanks for reading,
John
As we consider our founding, we might well think of the poem on the Statue of Liberty about sending “…your tired, your poor…the wretched refuse of your teeming shore…yearning to be free.” (Statue of Liberty, 1893). That’s just about how we started. Only the wealthy of Virginia (fleeing Cromwell) came as aristos. The Economist just described young America as “this unpromising venture, a republic” founded by the old world’s religious oddballs, then populated by its destitute farmers and the refugees from its wars” (July 2, 2026).
Three reasons to migrate: M. Abraham indicates that these wretched migrants in the American colonies had three models to pursue. Many sought economic opportunities in Jamestown or the Massachusetts Bay Colony, including printers, craftsmen, and yeoman farmers. Second, the Virginia Company, also Jamestown, spurred agricultural expansion, first with rice, then, sadly, with cotton and slaves on larger plantations. The third model, seeking religious freedom, included many who followed the example of the Pilgrims arriving at Plymouth Rock (The Face Off, p. 24). Economic, agricultural, and religious opportunities drove “the wretched refuse” to land on the American shores not only in the 1600s but beyond. These, along with political refugees, are what drive migrants to our shores today. We welcome them as we were welcomed.
As the 1700s unfolded, the early settlers were in growing colonies with important differences. These differences affected how they viewed the approaching American Revolution. A study by British historian Paul Johnson (History of the American People, 1997) sheds light on the various religious situations in the colonies.
The denominational status of the colonies included many Anglicans in New York who were loyal to the British Crown. The Scots-Irish and Presbyterians (495 churches in 1780) were fierce patriots and would never forgive the British for their treatment that drove them to the colonies. The many northern Congregationalists (749 churches) and the French Catholics and Huguenots were mostly patriots. The Anglicans (406 churches) who were not in New York lived in Virginia, where many were eager for the revolution.
There were people loyal to the British Crown all throughout the colonies. (Johnson (172-3). While virtually all colonists considered themselves British citizens, only about a third were patriots, another third were British loyalists, and the remainder could be content either way (171). After the war began, many loyalists were willing to lose everything to migrate to Canada, establishing it as a British nation, with a French minority rather than as a French nation (172-3). After the Revolution, about 80,000 loyalists left for Canada or England at great personal loss and seeking compensation from the Crown (173). The few free blacks suffered badly.
The Great Awakening: We are all aware of the enthusiasm and conversions of the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and less aware that its energy and church attendance fell dramatically after the Constitution was signed in 1781. At its peak of influence (when these ‘enthusiasts’ founded Princeton University), it had a significant impact on the Revolution, notably through the person of Jonathan Edwards, a preacher from New England who also briefly presided at Princeton and died there of malaria.
Jonathan Edwards constructed a surprisingly impactful theology that rejected the stingy or domineering understanding of God in Europe in favor of the God of opportunity and bounty, as found in nature and actually available to ordinary people in the new land. The hard northern Calvinism gradually gave way to an understanding that opportunity and freedom enabled people to thrive as individuals and as colonies, under God. Edwards focused on the beauty and love of God more than God’s sovereignty and judgment, though his famous sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” suggests the opposite. That sermon is also seen as an example of the new style of vibrant, vivid preaching. There was a new dynamism of faith in the colonies.
Several northern colonies outlawed slavery following Wilberforce (170), but life was hard for blacks and native Americans. Of course, slavery in the South continued and in fact worsened significantly later as the price of cotton rose in the 1780s due to the invention of the spinning jenny and power loom.
The magnificent statement in the Declaration of Independence about all men being created equal was an aspiration for all the “wretched refuse from the teeming shores”, and their liberation was founded in 1776. But for the slaves, that aspiration was more of a dream that waited until Abraham Lincoln (who had already opposed slavery) clearly added emancipation to the goal of preserving the Union in early 1863.
One hundred years later, Martin Luther King’s efforts finally made it possible to ‘cash the check’ extended to all Americans in 1776. The bounty and beauty of God still remain available to all.