The Laws of God by David Barton

They were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledged as the rules of their conduct. Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a church choir leader, musician, noted poet and literary figure, similarly discounted any notion of anarchy or rebellion in his 1777 work “A Political Catechism”:

Q. What is war?

A. The curse of mankind; the mother of famine and pestilence; the source of complicated miseries; and the undistinguishing destroyer of the human species.

Q. How is war divided?

A. Into offensive and defensive.

Q. What is the general object of an offensive war?

A. For the most part, it is undertaken to gratify the ambition of a prince, who wishes to subject to his arbitrary will a people whom God created free, and to gain an uncontrolled dominion over their rights and property.

Q. What is defensive war?

A. It is to take up arms in opposition to the invasions of usurped power and bravely suffer present hardships and encounter present dangers, to secure the rights of humanity and the blessings of freedom, to generations yet unborn.

Q. Is even defensive war justifiable in a religious view?

A. The foundation of war is laid in the wickedness of mankind. God has given man wit to contrive, power to execute, and freedom of will to direct his conduct. It cannot be but that some, from a depravity of will, will abuse these privileges and exert these powers to the injury of others: and the oppressed would have no safety nor redress but by exerting the same powers in their defense: and it is our duty to set a proper value upon and defend to the utmost our just rights and the blessings of life: otherwise a few miscreants unprincipled individuals would tyrannize over the rest of mankind, and make the passive multitude the slaves of their power. Thus it is that defensive is not only justifiable but an indispensable duty.

Q. Is it upon these principles that the people of America are resisting the arms of Great Britain, and opposing force with force?

A. Strictly so. And may Heaven prosper their virtuous undertaking! Quite simply, the American Revolution was not an act of anarchy. In fact, throughout the course of the struggle, the conflict was often described by the Americans as a civil war rather than a revolution; and a chronological survey of the acts before, during, and after America’s separation from Great Britain provides numerous examples illustrating the Americans’ consistent reliance on spiritual principles. For example, in the early 1770s when English oppression had been steadily mounting and injustices increasing, there had been no reliable source from which the Colonists could receive either accurate news reports or patriotic inspiration. To meet this need, Samuel Adams of Massachusetts and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia formed the Committees of Correspondence an early pony-express style news service. The original Committee in Boston had a threefold goal: 1 to delineate the rights the Colonists had as men, as Christians, and as subjects of the crown, 2 to detail how these rights had been violated, and 3 to publicize throughout the Colonies the first two items.