But he argues that the colonial character was nonetheless marked by a common religious liberalism: “From its beginnings, the new continent had seemed destined to be the home of religious tolerance.” This, he suggests, is because of the Bible, “the work of literature that was common to all of them.” Scripture was everywhere in the colonies. Citing “the historian Lecky”—presumably the nineteenth-century Irishman William Lecky—Coolidge contends that “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.”
For the “sturdy old divines of those days,” the Bible served as a patriotic rallying cry:
They knew the Book. They were profoundly familiar with it, and eminently capable in the exposition of all its justifications for rebellion. To them, the record of the exodus from Egypt was indeed an inspired precedent. They knew what arguments from holy writ would most powerfully influence their people. It required no great stretch of logical processes to demonstrate that the children of Israel, making bricks without straw in Egypt, had their modern counterpart in the people of the colonies, enduring the imposition of taxation without representation!
The idea of America as a kind of Israel, an “almost chosen nation,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words some generations earlier, was not new. William Bradford, founder of the Plymouth colony in 1620, compared his personal study of Hebrew to Moses seeing the Promised Land, yet not being permitted to enter. John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, founders of the New Haven colony in 1637, were expert Hebrew scholars; around half of the dozens of statutes in the New Haven code of 1655 contained references to Hebrew scripture. Davenport ensured that the first public school in New Haven included Hebrew in the core curriculum and encouraged broad engagement with, as Coolidge puts it, the “great figures of Hebrew history, with Joshua, Samuel, Moses, Joseph, David, Solomon, Gideon, Elisha.” The United States is peppered with place names sourced from the Bible: Salem, Sharon, Jericho, Bethlehem, Goshen, Shiloh, and Hebron are just a few examples.
George Washington famously sent warm greetings to Jewish congregations, most notably to a synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, where he offered a blessing inspired by Hebrew prophets: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
This biblical rootedness, Coolidge suggests, remains vital to maintaining a cohesive polity. A shared attachment to the Bible bolstered the patriot cause, drawing together scattered sympathies and interests and “divergencies of religious faith.” It is no wonder, he notes, that Jews—who first arrived on America’s shores in the 1650s—formed an integral part of the Revolutionary War effort, giving ample blood and treasure.
