143, 154.
68. James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South 1776–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 173.
69. Betty Wood, “Godwyn, Morgan (bap. 1640, d. 1685x1709).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10894 (accessed February 22, 2014).
70. Demographics in the middle colonies began to change about 1720, however. See Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from its Beginning to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984), 8–9.
71. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale, 2002), 328–29 and 338–41.
72. Bernard J. Lillis, “Forging New Communities: Indian Slavery and Servitude in Colonial New England, 1676–1776” (Bachelor of Arts thesis, Wesleyan University, Connecticut, 2012), 101; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 15.
The Age of Reason andthe American Colonies(1688–1740)
In 1688, the Parliament invited James II’s Protestant son-in-law and daughter from Holland to assume jointly the British throne as King (1688–1702) William III and Queen (1688–94) Mary II. Mary’s younger sister Anne supported their accession and succeeded them as monarch (1702–14). Collectively, the reign of the three marked an important turning point in the religious life of England and her colonies. Well aware of the turmoil that preceded them, the monarchs sought to quiet the tempers of English subjects by adopting a series of practical compromises (retention of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-nine Articles; adoption of an Act of Toleration for Protestant dissenters; and granting of broader authority to Parliament). In Scotland (a separate kingdom with a shared monarch until united with England in 1707), they abandoned their predecessors’ attempt to conform the church to that in England; the Church of Scotland would thereafter be Presbyterian. These measures were successful in maintaining the peace; the Glorious Revolution was the last revolution of the English people.
The peace in England was due not only to specific legislation but also to those who advanced new ways of thinking about English religion and society. The impact of this shift would be felt by English colonists in the New World. While it is impossible to point to all those involved in bringing the “Moderate Enlightenment” to England following the Glorious Revolution, it is possible to single out two important groups: the Royal Society and the latitudinarian bishops.1
In 1649, a group of scholars at Oxford University began to meet informally in order to gain what one member called “the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet with one another, without being ingag’d in the passions, and the madness of that dismal age.”2 In the midst of civil war and dogmatic debates, members of the group sought only the opportunity to discuss issues of common interest. At the Restoration, Charles II gave the group a charter (1662) and a name (the Royal Society). During the remainder of the seventeenth century, the society’s membership would include both prominent church figures and the leading intellectual lights of England: chemist Robert Boyle (1627–91), astronomer Edmund Halley (1656–1742), philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), mathematician Isaac Newton (1642–1727), Bishop of Rochester Thomas Sprat (1635–1713), Bishop of Salisbury Seth Ward (1617–89), Bishop of Chester John Wilkins (1614–1712), and architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723).3
Members of the society shared a bold vision—that a marriage of reason and faith provided a truly pious alternative to the violence that English Christians had experienced early in the century. They believed, moreover, that this vision would not only bring peace to the church but would also bring progress and prosperity to their nation. The same minds that solved religious controversies with patient application of reason could also solve scientific and mathematical problems, providing a basis for the continuing expansion of English industry, navigation, and trade. In the early eighteenth century, society president (1703–27) Isaac Newton presided over a transition in the society’s focus; church leaders played a declining role, and members focused more narrowly on scientific investigation. By that time, however, a broad spectrum of English Christians had accepted the vision of the society’s first generation as normative.
John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) was a classic statement of the faith of the society’s first generation. In his work, Locke attempted to escape from the intense theological argumentation, which had divided English Christians for most of his century, by characterizing the message of the New Testament with a few simple and logical propositions. Others, who were not themselves members of the society, supplemented Locke’s exposition. In The Analogy of Religion (1736), Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752) explained that this reasonable Christianity was consonant with the laws of nature. Catherine Cockburn (1679–1749), a playwright who turned to theological writing, echoed similar themes. Christian belief—and most particularly the Church of England’s understanding of it—was a reasonable faith, whose propagation went hand in hand with domestic peace, scientific advancement, and the success of the British Empire. This vision deeply influenced English and colonial Christians of all denominations.
When William III and Mary II came to the throne, all of the Scottish bishops and seven English bishops, including Archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft, refused to swear allegiance to the new king and queen. These nonjuring bishops (i.e., bishops who refused to swear allegiance) would provide the episcopal succession for a dissenting church that would continue as a separate institution into the nineteenth century. It would be particularly strong in Scotland, where William and Mary agreed to a Church of Scotland with presbyterian polity. It would be nonjuring bishops from Scotland who would consecrate American Samuel Seabury to the episcopate in 1784.
The new monarchs and the Parliament removed the seven English bishops from office and replaced them with popular London clergy who had supported the Glorious Revolution. Among the new appointees were Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), who became Bishop of Salisbury; John Tillotson (1630–94), who became Archbishop of Canterbury; Simon Patrick (1627– 1701), who became Bishop of Ely; and Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99), who became the Bishop of Worcester. Three of the four men had studied at Cambridge and the fourth (Burnet) admitted that he was deeply influenced by a group of teachers there, popularly known as the Cambridge Platonists. Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) was the most influential of these teachers. Drawing on the work of third-century Neoplatonic Egyptian philosopher Plotinus, they characterized religious
