Rethinking America by Murrin John M.; Shankman Andrew;

Author:Murrin, John M.; Shankman, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Fundamental Values, the Founding Fathers, and the Constitution

“WE FORMED OUR Constitution without any acknowledgement of God,” President Timothy Dwight told his Yale audience as the War of 1812 loomed threateningly over the community. “The Convention, by which it was formed, never asked, even once, his direction, or his blessing upon their labours. Thus we commenced our national existence under the present system, without God.” Dwight traveled a great deal and knew personally some of the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention. Very likely one of them told him about the day on which the Fathers of the Constitution refused to invoke God in any form.1

During one of the stormiest moments of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin tried to break the impasse between large-state and small-state advocates that threatened to paralyze the proceedings. Why, he asked on June 28, 1787, had the members “not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings?” During the prolonged crisis with Great Britain that had led to Independence, the First and Second Continental Congresses had routinely opened their proceedings with public prayers, be noted. He did not point out that the Rev. Jacob Duché, the principal chaplain to Congress in those years, had somewhat spoiled the overall effect by becoming a loyalist. Instead, Franklin insisted that the United States had already benefited from “frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor.” “God governs in the affairs of men,” he proclaimed emphatically. He therefore moved “that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.”2

The motion drew a second from Roger Sherman of Connecticut, one of two born-again Christians at the Convention, although his modern biographer, Christopher Collier, considers him a “political” New Light—someone, that is, who knew that joining the New Light coalition could be a prerequisite to a successful public career and who probably persuaded his neighbors (this point remains unclear) that he had experienced the conversion required of a full church member.3

What happened after Franklin and Sherman urged the Founding Fathers to invoke God? Alexander Hamilton, we know, opposed the motion. However proper such a gesture might have been at the outset of the Convention, he argued, it was imprudent “at this late day” because it might indicate to the broader public: “that the embarrassments and dissentions within the convention, had suggested this measure.” So James Madison recorded at the time.4 According to the much later and highly problematic recollections of the youngest delegate at the gathering, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, Hamilton accompanied his objections with a highly irreverent speech. We shall probably never know whether Hamilton said anything of the kind at that particular moment, but the sentiments attributed to him by Dayton are quite compatible with the convictions of an admirer of David Hume, the skeptical Scottish philosopher whose writings Hamilton had devoured early in his military career.

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