Covenantal Democracy in America: Two Radicalisms.
A recent biography of Alexander Hamilton (Chernow 2004 34) notes with
interest that at the age of seventeen the future statesman and co-author of the
Federalist Papers came under the spell of one Hugh Knox, an Irish
Presbyterian minister who had been educated at the College of New Jersey
and preached in Delaware before moving to the Caribbean town of St. Croix.
Hamilton’s subsequent connections to the influential Presbyterian William
Livingston and his family (p. 43), hints at a Calvinist background to the
political thought of the American Revolution. The suggestion is strengthened
by Ralph Ketcham’s biography of James Madison (1990 48), where he points
to the possible influence on him of his Presbyterian tutors, Donald Robertson,
Thomas Martin, and especially John Witherspoon. The case for a significant
or even preponderant role being assigned to Reformed religion in the
Founding is advanced by the observation of historians such as Clark (1994
362) and Sandoz (1990 125) that the struggle of the patriot side for
independence was seen by some contemporaries as “nothing more nor less
than an Irish-Scotch Presbyterian Rebellion.” Yet Bernard Bailyn’s account
of the origins of the political ideas of the Revolutionary Era (1967 32) allows
for only one Calvinist strand among the six which he identifies, and this is
limited to the atypical covenanting Calvinism of the New England population
of congregationalists, without reference to mainline Calvinists in the other
colonies. Why does a leading account of the ideas of the Revolution (May
1976 46) pass over what is arguably its dominant religious component? We
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Convention