The story does not begin in 1776. It does not begin with Concord, the Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution. It does not really even begin in the Dutch city of Leiden, where a colony of English Christian nonconformists settled after its members decided upon the spiritual necessity of separating themselves from the Church of England and hence, the times being what they were, with the English state. From King Henry II and the martyr Thomas à Becket to King Henry VIII and the martyr Thomas More, the consistent stupidity of the English state left its enforcers unable to distinguish between disloyalty to the crown and loyalty to the kingdom that is not of this world. And so the Puritans were persecuted. That much was inevitable.
They fled England and found tolerance in Holland — in fact, they found too much of it for their liking. The Dutch have been Dutch for a very long time, and they are not what you would call natural ascetics. The libertine Dutch culture (along with the notoriously difficult Dutch language) left the Puritans alienated. But it did not have the same effect on the Puritans’ children, who, to the dismay of their pious parents, began to acclimate themselves, becoming more Dutch by the day and less Puritan. Some of the refugees had made very comfortable livings for themselves in the university town of Leiden, enough to help to provide for those whose were less prepared to thrive in the university precincts. Compared with the commercial city of Amsterdam, Leiden offered relatively little opportunity to make a living by manual labor. But give the old Protestant work ethic its due. William Bradford, the colony’s unofficial historian, wrote: “They fell to such trads & imployments as they best could; valewing peace & their spirituall comforte above any other riches whatsoever. And at length they came to raise a competente & comforteable living, but with hard and continuall labor.”
Hard work, comfortable living. The Puritans would have recognized exactly where they were: The Land of Goshen, in which the Israelites thrived and grew complacent in spite of the heavy burden of labor laid upon them by the Egyptians. And that’s where the story really begins.
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See Also:
(1) It’s a Wonderful Time to Be Alive
(2) Taking the Founders’ Moral Ideas Seriously
(3) Daniel Webster: America Rests Upon Gratitude For Our Government Of And For The People
