When we think of the American Revolution and the period leading to the drafting of the Constitution, what often comes to mind is an impression of metaphysical orderliness—of intellectual connections to the parallel Enlightenments occurring in England, Scotland, and France; of principled and articulate leaders (many of whom embraced rationalistic belief systems such as Unitarianism and Deism); of mathematical and mechanistic metaphors and arguments; and of an appeal to natural rights and common sense.
But common sense is a door that swings two ways, suggesting at the same time both a universal standard of reasonableness and an individual’s particular claim on the truth. When the revolutionaries enshrined “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as unalienable rights, they created the conditions for a remarkable array of political and civic institutions to emerge that gave specific meaning and shape to these freedoms. But freedom is always wont to seep out of its various containers. The world the Revolution created was certainly one of state and federal constitutions, organized religion, voluntary associations, and material progress, but it was also one of miracles, syncretic beliefs, conspiratorial thinking, and the magic of crowds. The Revolution was, in a word, weird.
ALTHOUGH THE WITCH TRIALS that made Salem, Massachusetts, famous suggest that the American colonists harbored hatred and fear of the occult, Christianity was not the only belief system that made its way across the Atlantic from Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians have shown that religious and political leaders in both the northern and southern colonies possessed an array of works on alchemy, astrology, and magic in their libraries. Books like John Baptista Porta’s Natural Magick, Thomas Tryon’s Pythagoras: His Mystic Philosophy Reviv’d, and Thomas Vaughan’s Magia Adamica blurred the lines between the study of the natural and supernatural. Such an interest wasn’t limited to elites. Almanacs full of astrological predictions were popular among all classes of colonial society, and printers lamented that readers just wouldn’t buy almanacs that omitted diagrams of the zodiac.
As always, the religious practices of ordinary folk were a point of contention for American religious leadership. As Anglicans, Presbyterians, Quakers, and the many other Protestant sects that made a home for themselves in the colonies grew, built churches and seminaries, and intertwined with colonial governments over the course of the eighteenth century, their ministers denounced occultism more and more furiously, even as their flocks continued to embrace some of its practices.