June is the usual month for the convening of Presbyterian assemblies, but the jewel in the crown of Presbyterian reforms, replacing bishops with lengthy committee meetings, seems less impressive today than it did in 1560 when the Scots held their first General Assembly. In fact, the June assemblies have genuine significance for the history of the Americans, which can be seen in two national holidays separated by forty-eight hours. Canada went first on July 1 with Canada Day. America followed with the Fourth of July. Those dates owe something to Presbyterianism’s reformist outlook, which in turn says something about the Presbyterian role in consolidating the government of North America.

　　Presbyterians were at the forefront of supporting the events that these holidays honor—Canada’s formation in 1867 as a Dominion (Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick) and America’s assertion of independence. Were these Protestants more influential than Congregationalists in the United States or Anglicans in Canada? An answer is beyond the scope of this essay, but Presbyterian support was clearly crucial.

　　The case of Presbyterians in the United States is easier because of the familiar trope that the American Revolution was a “Presbyterian rebellion.” King George III used that phrase to complain about both Presbyterians and revolution, but it was a widely accepted way to make sense of American independence. George III was echoing James VI/I who had declared roughly 170 years prior, “No bishop, no king,” in response to Presbyterian efforts to reform the Church of Scotland. It was a recognition that Presbyterian church government, by challenging the rule of bishops, led inevitably to the repudiation of the monarchy. Presbyterians’ long history of complaining (from at least 1560 to 1690) partly explains the British interpretation of the American Revolution as a Presbyterian rebellion. James Webb, former US secretary of the Navy, summarized this perception as late as 2004 when he wrote in his book, Born Fighting, that Presbyterian Ulster Scots’ “refusal to be intimidated from above” was in the “Scots-Irish DNA.” 

　　That description actually fails to capture the work of Presbyterian clerics in the American Founding. John Witherspoon, a Scottish Presbyterian who came to America in 1768 to lead the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), was a political moderate who saw political independence as a means to preserve the advantages colonists already enjoyed. Some Scots brought to the colonies convictions forged by the likes of John Knox or Samuel Rutherford. Witherspoon’s politics ran instead in grooves cut by Scottish philosophers like Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid. 

　　As much as Witherspoon’s philosophical outlook may explain his politics, his intellectual history misses an aspect of the colonial experience that was even more basic than moral philosophy. This was the ecclesiastical settlement of England’s 1707 union with Scotland. Unlike older Presbyterian politics informed by the covenants among the crown, parliament, and church, colonial Presbyterians in America looked to the 1707 Union for protection of the fairly recent (1690) establishment of Presbyterianism as the Church of Scotland’s polity. Witherspoon was part of a group of Presbyterian preachers who remained loyal to the Hanoverian monarchy over and against the tyrannical abuses of Parliament in London to protect the Presbyterian status quo in Scotland. These Presbyterians did not adopt the rhetoric of some New England radicals who conceived of the patriotic cause as an extension of the Solemn League and Covenant. Instead, Witherspoon appealed to British norms derived from the 1707 Union. The Union between England and Scotland also served as a model for a confederation within the Empire. Witherspoon hoped that North American colonies might find a place within the British government similar to Scotland’s position within the United Kingdom.

　　Most accounts of Witherspoon’s support for American independence feature his famous 1776 sermon, “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men.” Even here, his calculations were as political as they were religious. He delivered the sermon six weeks before he signed the Declaration of Independence and depicted the controversy between Britain and America as mainly one of a legislative body, “independent of us” and interested in “opposing us,” making laws for the colonies without the colonists’ input. When he did invoke religion in the sermon, Witherspoon used boilerplate civil religion to position Christianity as a bulwark of social stability.

　　Repeated appropriations of that sermon miss Witherspoon’s practical evaluation of the costs and benefits of America’s place within the British Empire independent of religious considerations. His explanation to fellow Scots for opposition to Parliament was that Americans were simply trying to preserve the freedom and prosperity they had enjoyed before the 1760s. London’s power to tax might have seemed “agreeable” to the form of the British Constitution, but its daily practice was “inconsistent with [its] spirit.” Contrary to British writers who claimed that the colonies had advanced because of their close ties to Great Britain, Witherspoon argued that Americans’ success was the direct result of “British liberty.” Political independence would simply formalize the sort of freedom the colonies had enjoyed before Parliament’s taxes and tariffs. Witherspoon even argued that political independence would benefit Great Britain because America’s prosperity would lift the United Kingdom’s economic boat. In effect, his religiously informed assessment of the struggle depended on generic assessments of virtue but had little to say about the specifics of church-state relations. Like fellow colonial Presbyterians, Witherspoon did not have expectations about an ecclesiastical establishment (like Scotland or Ireland) because the colonial churches had operated as voluntary institutions.

　　Grant’s concern for improved working conditions and standards of living was bound up with confidence in the blessings afforded by a confederation of Canadian colonies.

　　What Presbyterian leaders like Witherspoon showed was a set of political priorities several steps removed from the seventeenth century. At the time of the English Civil Wars, when Scotland became an ally of the English Parliament in its war with Charles I, Presbyterians were committed to a national covenant (an example of Christian nationalism if there ever was one) that put a reformed national church at the center of Scottish identity. One hundred years later and an ocean removed, Presbyterian zeal had cooled considerably, thanks to the Glorious Revolution. Now, colonial North American society taught the benefits of religious liberty and self-government.

　　Although Canadian Presbyterians rejected independence from Britain, they were no less desirous of a civil polity geared specifically for North American circumstances. In the case of Canadian confederation, Presbyterians were important advocates, such that church historian John Webster Grant claimed that support for the consolidation of British provinces depended significantly on the churches molding public opinion. The confederation process started in 1841 with the unification of Upper and Lower Canada into one province. But that political act of unity was fraught with tensions between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Alongside Protestant-Catholic tensions, Presbyterians themselves came to Canada in four separate varieties with political outlooks informed by almost two centuries of contending for the spiritual autonomy of the Kirk (the national Presbyterian church) over and against British monarchs. Unlike Scotland, where different ideals for a godly nation prevented cooperation, in Canada a preference for political consolidation led Presbyterians to shed a Scottish for a Canadian identity. 

　　The career of George Monro Grant, a pastor of humble origins from Nova Scotia who became principal of Queen’s University in Ontario, illustrates Canadian Presbyterians’ evolution. Born in 1835, Grant toggled back and forth between the rivalries of Scottish Presbyterians who had settled in North America. His education began among the Seceders, but when his parents transferred to a Church of Scotland congregation in Nova Scotia, Grant became eligible for scholarships to study at university in Scotland. At the University of Glasgow in the 1850s, Grant became involved in the Free Church (a communion formed in 1843 in opposition to London’s meddling with the Church of Scotland). Although an advocate of the kind of urban ministry practiced by the widely admired Thomas Chalmers, Grant reacted poorly to the Free Church’s theological strictness.

　　Back in Canada, he emerged as a champion of both Presbyterian union and Canadian confederation. In Grant’s mind, what was good for Canada was also desirable for Canadian Presbyterians. Telling the difference was sometimes difficult since Grant’s estimate of the church’s work was bound up with serving greater Canada. Indeed, the church was a principle means for achieving a unified Canadian people. A union of four separate Presbyterian denominations at the time of the Confederation in 1867 became a crucial step in the consolidation of the dominion itself. Grant’s 1873 book, Ocean to Ocean, a travelogue written while a participant on Sandford Fleming’s expedition across western Canada, became a Presbyterian-inflected case for confederation “under the aegis of empire.” Grant even believed Canada had beaten the United States in the race for an ocean-to-ocean presence by absorbing the lands formerly controlled by the Hudson Bay Company. The inclusion of British Columbia was a case of the Canadian people “triumphing over all the obstacles of nature.”

　　Grant’s concern for improved working conditions and standards of living was bound up with confidence in the blessings afforded by a confederation of Canadian colonies. He viewed the Northwest as a “great and fertile” land, capable of sustaining millions of people. The air was “pure and dry,” ready to sustain “health and strength of body.” It had the potential to be a home for the “stream of emigration that runs from northern and central Europe to America.” Still, Canada needed more than material resources. It also needed a people of character. Here Grant was optimistic in ways that departed from Presbyterian realism. “We come from a race that never counted the number of its foes, nor the number of its friends, when freedom, loyalty or God was concerned.” Canada was for Grant “the last clear field given by a beneficent Creator in which the children of men could have scope, untrammeled by ancient institutions, to work out the best ideas derived from the experience of the past.” Grant’s hope was ecumenical. He included Roman Catholics in his vision for Canada.

　　In 1875, when Canadian Presbyterians gathered in Montreal to celebrate the union of most Scottish churches into the Presbyterian Church of Canada, Grant’s hopes for Canada and his fellow Presbyterians were realized. It was just four years after the reception of British Columbia into the Canadian Confederation, and though Grant was not the only church official to speak, his participation testified to the influence that Canadian Presbyterians had on forging a new identity both for the Dominion and for the church.

　　Though they were on opposite sides of the American Revolution, Presbyterians in North America were similarly effervescent in support for new political organizations. This is truly one of the many ironies of the British legacy in the New World. On the one hand, Presbyterians in Canada and the United States demonstrated that Reformed Protestantism was remarkably flexible in adapting to local settings. On the other hand, Presbyterianism in the United States and Canada reflects the Scottish Reformation’s legacy of church reform being part of the political establishment. Even if the churches in North America were not established (Canadian Presbyterians did receive some financial support from the government), Presbyterians had a high view of the state. Assemblies could oversee the church; civil magistrates had a duty to nurture a godly society.

　　Whether Canada or the United States would have impressed John Calvin or John Knox, Presbyterians in both countries functioned as if the health of their societies depended on their church’s teaching and worship. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Canada and the United States both had a Presbyterian founding. But both understood political independence for America, and confederation for Canada, to be an outworking of Presbyterian conviction and effort.