English Methodists and Irish Presbyterians in the American Revolution

For Independence Day, Christianity Today republished two online articles by Mark Noll on Christians in the American Revolution. Noll mentions early Methodist leaders in both articles.

In Tory Believers: Which Higher Loyalty Noll discusses the Wesleys and Mr. Asbury:

It is not surprising that Loyalism existed among Methodists, who at the time of the Revolution were still a fledgling body in America. From England, American Methodists received word of Charles Wesley’s openly stated belief in the doctrines of divine right and passive obedience. John Wesley, for his part, expressed public sympathy for the inequities inflicted upon the colonies. But he also criticized American Whigs for their highly exaggerated prattle about the “slavery” resulting from British policies and for their disobedience of the clear scriptural injunction to be subject to the powers that be. In seeking to put British wrongs in their proper light, Wesley reminded his American friends that the true slaves in the colonies were the Negroes. He also cited himself as an example of an Englishman who, because he did not meet the property qualifications, was not able to vote in parliamentary elections and who therefore paid taxes without representation. Because of the wide publicity given to the Wesleys’ opinions on the conflict, Methodists in America were suspected of Toryism. Indeed, many of the Methodist missionaries in America probably shared their leaders’ political sentiments. Whether they agreed or not, all the English missionaries except Francis Asbury returned to the mother country during the war. Asbury, who shared a patriotic sense of outrage at British imperial policies, did not hide his displeasure over Wesley’s comments on the political crisis. Owing at least in part to Asbury’s rejection of Wesley’s Toryism, Methodists were able to resume their rapid advances in America after the war while other Loyalist bodies, particularly the Anglicans, suffered long under the stigma of Toryism.

In Was the Revolutionary War Justified, Noll revisits the issue of slavery and Methodism:

Only one population in the colonies clearly was justified by classical Christian reasoning in taking up arms to defend itself—the half-million or so enslaved African Americans who were held in bondage as the result of armed attacks upon peaceful noncombatants. When it comes to the British actions toward the colonies in the decade before 1776, almost all historians concede those actions were insensitive, based on lamentable misconceptions of colonial life, and often simply stupid. … But were the admitted abuses serious enough to warrant an armed revolution? Patriot leaders thought so, but there is a problem with why they thought so. They were troubled less by actual evils (like the tax on tea, which, ironically, had made tea cheaper in the colonies than in England). Rather, they interpreted the bumbling British actions as a conspiracy to exterminate liberty in the colonies…. In short, it was the patriot fear of what Britain intended to do that led them to take up arms. Some British Christians thought this fear ludicrous. John Fletcher, a leading Methodist, wrote sympathetically in 1776 about the plight of American slaves, “whose groans upbraid the hypocritical friends of liberty [in America], who buy, and sell, and whip their fellow men as if they were brutes; and absurdly complain that they are enslaved.” But patriot colonists saw things very differently indeed. They thought they were menaced by a comprehensive plot to violate their rights and property, and so they went to war.

My own Revolutionary War ancestor was a Scots-Irish Presbyterian who immigrated to the colonies shortly before the war began. He was in one of hundreds of thousands of Ulster Scots who fled poverty and tyranny in Ireland during the 18th century.

We usually think of Protestants in Ireland pitted against Roman Catholics. That was not the only conflict in 17th century Ireland. The Ulster Scots not only bumped up against their Catholic neighbors but against their Anglican-British overlords as well. Most Ulster Scots were poor farmers who paid high rents to absentee landlords. Economic opportunity was perhaps the primary motivation for the mass migration of Scots-Irish to the American colonies in the 18th century.

And while economic opportunity may have been the primary motivation for leaving Ireland, it was not the only reason. Irish Presbyterians and Catholics both suffered severe economic hardships, but the vast majority of 18th century Irish emigrants were Protestant (despite the fact that they were much fewer in number to begin with). The Presbyterians were not only vastly outnumbered by their Catholic neighbors, they were variously ignored, betrayed, oppressed and exploited by the British ascendancy. Even though the Ulster Scots had had supported William of Orange in his Irish battles against the French-backed Jacobites, the crown did not reward them with favor. After William secured the the throne, the British took little action to relieve the siege of Londonderry by Jacobite forces and allowed half of the city’s population to starve to death. Members of non-conforming churches like the Ulster Presbyterians were also socially and legally disadvantaged. For their costly loyalty to the crown, the Irish Presbyterians were rewarded with the indignities of the Test Act of 1704, the Schism Act of 1714 and other legal forms of discrimination. Emigration to the colonies promised religious freedom to the non-conforming Presbyterians.

I imagine that my ancestor brought his social and religious world view with him when he emigrated from Ireland to the American colonies, as did hundreds of thousands of others. The Scots-Irish population of the American colonies boomed in the 18th century with many immigrants settling in the untamed mountains and foothills of the west. The rugged land reminded them of home. Most Scots-Irish immigrants were tough, poor, pious, uneducated, fiercely loyal to kin and more than a little willing to fight when it mattered (and sometimes when it didn’t). That’s how they had survived for centuries. (See James Webbs’s Born Fighting for more on the Scots-Irish in America.)

It is easy for me to believe, then, that my ancestor and the his fellow Scots-Irish immigrants would have interpreted British actions in the worst possible light. They had centuries of bad experiences with the British and many of them surely crossed the ocean with a chip on their shoulders. No one had to talk my ancestor into this fight; he joined a regiment of the Continental Line in the first days of the war. Many other Scots-Irish were ambivalent about the war at the beginning of the conflict, considering it to be a fight between Englishmen. The conduct of British troops in the southern campaign, however, convinced many fence-sitters to join the rebels’ cause. Some, like my ancestor, fought in the regular army. Others fought in militias comprised of frontiersmen and farmers. By the end of the Revolutionary War, the Scots-Irish comprised such a large portion of the American force that a Hessian officer called the conflict a “Presbyterian rebellion.”

Noll says that there was a lot of misunderstanding between the British and the Americans before the rebellion began. That misunderstanding, he says, helped set the stage for the war that followed. Along these lines, Wesley’s and Fletcher’s dismissive attitude toward colonial complaints misses a crucial fact: the large number of Scots-Irish immigrants who now populated the colonies did not by-and-large own slaves; they couldn’t afford them. The poor Scots-Irish farmer on the western frontier survived by subsistence farming and hunting. Even if they could have afforded slaves, upstate farming was not at that point well suited for a slave economy. Mr. Wesley was perhaps thinking of the English planters he knew in Savannah in the 1730’s; he had no experience with the Scots-Irish farmer on the western frontier. In any case, the English Methodist vision of rich, slave-owning Americans whining about relatively trivial impositions by the crown did not fit a large segment of the colonial population that took up arms against England. These pious, uncultured immigrants from Ireland eventually turned the tide of the war. The Scots-Irish had known generations of English oppression before they ever stepped foot on American soil, and they were not willing that they should have to endure it again in this new land.