Revolution: Right or Responsibility? The Mid-Atlantic Discourse on Faith, Duty, and Authority in the Early American Revolution

ABSTRACT While historians have traditionally framed the American Revolution as an expression of Locke’s secular “right of revolution,” many Americans revolutionaries turned to God for guidance and developed a more radical theory of disobedience that rendered resistance to tyrants a religiopolitical duty. This article investigates the proliferation of the so-called responsibility to revolt across the mid-Atlantic during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. After originating in Reformation Europe, the idea of a responsibility to revolt was brought to New England by the Puritans. The American Revolution then motivated and facilitated the spread of this idea to the middle colonies. As writers from New England sought to introduce their southern neighbors to Reformed resistance theory, mid-Atlantic clergymen like John Witherspoon and George Duffield took on a leading role in convincing others that involvement in the Revolution was a duty all individuals owed to God, their fellow countrymen, and posterity.