This post is a part of the 2025 Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, which were edited and compiled by members of the CRE’s board alongside editors at Age of Revolutions.
By Kevin Murphy
Introduction
In the eighteenth century, many people in colonial America and beyond regarded promises made under oath to be binding in a manner and to an extent foreign to us today. People took oaths in their everyday lives as they do today, but they treated them with more solemnity and gravity in the eighteenth century. The premium placed on honor, religious faith, and courage in this period is reflected by the weight attached to taking or refusing oaths. Oaths held enormous power over the people that took them, and this power played a central and decisive role in the conduct, outcome, and legacy of the American Revolution. The validity of a sworn promise was so suppositional that it could potentially create legitimacy where none was otherwise thought to exist. Oaths, even forced ones, helped decide who was right when different people and ideas were in contention. The American Revolution, which saw oaths employed at every step from mob rule to an eventual federal union, was an ideal example of this power. It also illustrates the inherent difficulty of establishing sovereignty and maintaining individual rights in a pluralistic society.
Oaths historically played an especially important role during times of crisis and the American Revolution was just that. It was a legal and constitutional crisis over rights and sovereignty. It was a social crisis that divided communities, challenged authority, and decided the fortunes of people for better or worse. It was also a crisis of identity and morality, depriving many decision-makers of a safe guide for their conduct. For all these reasons, diverse groups of people depended on the power and moral clarity associated with oath-taking. Sacred, honorable, and traditional, oaths promised a sense of stability to people amidst the whirlwind threatening their lives and communities.
The consistent reliance on oaths of loyalty during this period brings into relief the inherent chaos and uncertainty that caused and directed the conflict. Oaths of loyalty attempted to frame, at times, inscrutable questions of political authority and obligation as simple tests of virtue, and, hence, of social worth. This produced anguish among many principled people who either opposed the oaths or felt uncertain about committing their souls to the terms of loyalty dictated to them. Many people, including Quakers, absolutely refused the oaths demanded of them and paid a terrible price. Still, oaths were a powerful weapon which both sides fought to control, highlighting the vital role of coercion in this fight for liberty.[1]
Oaths were also a powerful assertion of virtue, conviction, and fitness for liberty, making them an ideal opportunity for marginalized groups to place themselves at the center of the contest. Widows and other solitary women employed oaths to defend their rights and navigate the crises produced by the war. Enslaved people were especially active in demonstrating their sworn loyalty to whichever side would offer freedom in return. This crisis thus offered an opportunity for advancement to those who needed it the most. Overall, an analysis of the multiple uses of loyalty oaths during the American Revolution helps us better understand the elements of the conflict along with its overall legacy.
The American Revolution in Historical Context
The crisis of the American Revolution was rooted in the very nature of English colonization itself. In turn, colonization was born of and shaped by the battles over religious and political authority in Britain. In this way, the American Revolution was an attempt to resolve vexing questions of sovereignty and freedom, both largely driven by practices of oath-taking. Oath taking was both integral to everyday life and highly politicized in early modern Britain. Oaths were central to the English and Scottish Reformations, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and every other consequential event in British history. Attempts to impose oaths, and equally determined attempts to refuse them, informed the rationale for creating Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the New England colonies. However, colonization itself did nothing but partially outsource these controversies over oaths, while compounding them with the question of colonial governance. Consequently, oaths were also central to every political and social conflict in colonial America, from Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia to New York’s Leisler’s Rebellion in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution.[2]
The Crisis of Sovereignty
Christopher Pearl defines crisis as a recurring theme through colonial and revolutionary America. Though Pearl focuses exclusively on Pennsylvania, his fundamental approach is extremely useful for understanding politics and society in a variety of places across the British Atlantic and beyond. This “crisis,” as Pearl defines it, stemmed from fundamental gaps in religious, legal, and political authority. Consequently, people improvised and created strong notions of authority among themselves.[3] Oaths were instrumental in filling these gaps and ambiguities in authority in far more ways than Pearl mentions, even in the heavily Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. Their fundamental role in economic exchange, social clubs and political protest was a source of social stability even amid the legal and political disfunction in the colonial period.[4]
The power of oaths was put to the ultimate test in the constitutional crisis beginning in the 1760s, when political legitimacy truly began to erode. In many respects, these oaths maintained a coherent, disciplined, and quasi-legitimate means of resistance. The resignation of Stamp Distributors such as Boston’s Andrew Oliver were often confirmed by a sworn promise to keep to their resignation, administered by a Justice of the Peace, and published in colonial newspapers. “Patriots” formed “associations,” whose frequently sworn commitments were putatively “voluntary” but strictly enforced as law. In these ways, so-called patriots laid the foundations of sovereignty which they could fully assert when they were determined to. As Pearl describes, patriots made forceful use of oaths of loyalty to solidify their claims to sovereignty. In this way, oaths went a long way in mitigating the political crisis produced in the 1760s and 1770s.[5] However, they produced crises of their own.
The Crisis of Authority
The fundamental power of oaths lay in the individual’s invocation of divine power, a supreme resource intended to confirm authority but in realty available to any person.[6] The military and political chaos of the war created problems and opportunities for various people, expanding the number of those making public oaths. The experience of women offers one such example. Denied a formal political identity, women often strove to establish one for self-defense in the absence of their husbands. The misogyny of the period meant that the active political consent of women was often discounted as both impossible and unnecessary. Consequently, women were seldom asked to take an oath of allegiance. However, women nonetheless made important political decisions based—or even despite—those made by their husbands. They represented themselves in petitions and pled their own political dispositions as a matter of self-defense, and, sometimes, they took oaths. Massachusetts took the extraordinary step of allowing women to maintain their dowry rights if they remained in the state and personally swore allegiance it, something women attempted elsewhere. These cases of limited autonomy had no basis in enlightened attitudes towards women. They were solely caused by the dislocations, uncertainties, and open political contestations of war. Still, they offered otherwise unheard-of opportunities for female self-assertion.[7]
Rachel Wells’ petition to Congress in 1786 is a case in point. The widow Wells lent New Jersey a hefty sum of money during the war and incurred further losses from her attachment to the patriot cause. Now destitute, and repeatedly ignored by the provincial authorities, Wells’ petition displayed a remarkable degree of assertiveness. She boldly referenced her own oaths and the superseding power of divine judgement. Most striking is her reference to the oath she took upon loaning the money, stating that she was then a resident of the state of New Jersey, upon which her claim to reimbursement was based. In doing so, Wells defined herself as a citizen in a way most women could not, and as a femme sole, she could possibly have sworn allegiance to New Jersey in addition to her financial contribution.[8] Her own confidence is mirrored by the political and fiscal impotence of Congress, signaling a crisis of myriad dimensions. The widow Wells chastened Congress for its unwillingness or inability to reward its loyal citizens and pay its debts, venting her frustration upon a government struggling to maintain the respect of the people.
The Crisis of Identity
Participants in the American Revolution used oaths to do far more than assert their individual rights. More commonly, they used them to assert their authority and compel compliance from others. This was a successful tactic, but one troubled by the same political and moral quandaries that had plagued British history. These difficulties were illuminated by the abuse directed by local patriots toward Israel Williams of Hatfield, Massachusetts. A prominent figure in local government, Williams’ opposition to colonial resistance had been clear long before independence, and patriot harassment accomplished nothing over the course of the war. Confined with his family for years, Williams’ adherence to the loyalist cause was an enormous embarrassment to his captors in Hatfield. They desired reconciliation more than he did.[9]
The people of Hatfield petitioned the state of Massachusetts to grant Israel Williams and his sons their freedom, but there was a catch. First, the Williams’ would have to make a petition to the Massachusetts government and “voluntarily”takean oath of allegiance to it.[10] Strangely, the people of Hatfield expected that Israel Williams would end their moral dilemma voluntarily. They seemed to assume that the rectitude of their political movement was obvious, and that Israel Williams and his sons were simply being stubborn. If they could somehow get their captives to see this, then they could neatly cast the whole episode as a tale of redemption and harmony. Unfortunately, they failed to truly grasp the loyalist principles that inspired Israel Williams’ defiance.
Despite being imprisoned indefinitely, Israel Williams responded to the offer with scorn. He knew what patriot authorities were trying to do, and he would not be part of it. Israel Williams and his sons considered the new attempt to impose an oath of loyalty “unkind and ungenerous…calculated further to imbarass us…” Israel Williams’ determined rejection of patriot oaths upended the narrative his captors wanted to tell about their movement. After being released, Israel Williams resumed a life of status and influence, and he never had to renounce his loyalism.[11]
Returning the Genie to the Bottle
The Framers of the United States Constitution were determined to leave such awkward and embarrassing episodes in the past. Unfortunately for the victorious Americans, men like Israel Williams did not simply disappear, and neither did the issues they raised. Those seeking stability hoped oaths would no longer be used by their fellow citizens as tools of coercion. After Independence, many also felt anxiety that governments were employing oaths too arbitrarily, especially since they were not as necessary as they had been. Rhode Island’s attempt to combat inflation through coercive oaths is one remarkable example. The state required those who sought political office, law practice, or other honors to swear (or affirm) that they would treat Rhode Island currency as gold or silver and accept it for all transactions. Some people condemned the law as flagrant government overreach, both in its requirement of an impractical oath and its presumption to regulate prices and currency. Both tactics were common during the war, but fell out of favor afterwards, especially among the rising Federalist elite.[12]
At the same time, Federalists desired a government with strong and clear powers, to command respect and eliminate the ambiguities and gaps in authority which allow the masses to take things into their own hands.[13] Eager to enhance their civil power, framers of the United States Constitution promoted a studied ambiguity on religious matters. Federalists supported public prayer and invocations of God in past constitutions and public documents, but they were doing something different now. While they viewed fundamental political reform as important, the country was not in the crisis it had been ten years prior during the War for Independence. They wanted to proceed with cool deliberation, not frantic pleadings with God to spare them from destruction. In some sense, they wanted to lower the temperature of political debate.[14] The United States Constitution consciously rejected the religious politics of the past, as the nation sought to come together both religiously and politically.[15]
Overall, oaths produced a special kind of obligation during the American Revolution, one rooted in the unique values of the period. They represented faith, honor, and civic responsibility in a distinct way, allowing people to assert all these qualities in taking oaths. However, they also produced obligations that were difficult, if not impossible, to avoid without a significant loss of reputation. They thus had a unique power to promote stability even when political authority was uncertain. In fact, they were a weapon of war whose power was far greater than contemporary legal understandings of oaths can comprehend. They represented a form of coercion at odds with our own understandings of religious liberty and personal autonomy, formed after the American Revolution. The use of oaths during that crisis thus demonstrates how far our own values have changed from that time.[16]
Kevin Murphy earned his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University in New York. His dissertation examined the role of public and private oaths in establishing solidarity and authority across the British Atlantic, and especially during the American Revolution. In 2020-2021, he was a dissertation fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has presented his research in three different countries and has been cited multiple times in peer-reviewed works, in addition to his own peer-reviewed publications.
[1] Kevin Murphy, “Coercion and Sworn Bond in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic” (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2023): 1, 6, 10-12; The Quaker’s refusal to take oaths is particularly illustrative of the religious scruples and political controversies described here. Richard C. Allen and Rosemary Moore, eds. The Quakers, 1656-1723: The Evolution of an Alternative Community. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2018); Meredith Weddle, Walking in the Way of Peace: Quaker Pacifism in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Owen S. Ireland, Religion, Ethnicity and Politics: Ratifying the Constitution in Pennsylvania (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); See also n.2, below.
[2] The literature on this subject in early modern Britain is rich. See Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jonathan Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1999) Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism, and the Political Nation: 1553-1682 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005); John Walter, Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Culture in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Edward Vallance and Harald Braun, eds., Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Patrick Fagan, Divided Loyalties: The Question of the Oath for Irish Catholics in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997); Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions, eds. Sharon Adams and Julian Goodacre (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2014). The literature for North America is smaller but still significant. See Evan Haefeli. Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); Alexander B. Haskell, For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Google Play Books. See also Kevin Murphy, Coercion and Sworn Bond, 12- 111.
[3] Christopher R. Pearl. Conceived in Crisis: The Revolutionary Creation of an American State. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020).
[4] David G. Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014); Stephen C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
[5] Boston Newsletter, December 23, 1765; Boston (Hanover-Square), Dec 18, 1765. Messieurs Drapers…True Sons of Liberty [Boston 1765] [2] pp. NYPL Copy. Evans Fiche 41523. Early American imprints. Series I, Series I. 1639.Worcester, Mass: Readex Microprint Corporation; Pearl, 279-93, especially, 283, 287, 289, 291-92; The literature on early colonial resistance is vast. See Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), Peter C. Messer, “Stamps and Popes: Rethinking the Role of Violence in the Coming of the American Revolution,” in Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era, eds. Patrick Griffin, Robert G. Ingram, Peter S. Onuf, and Brian Schoen. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Murphy, Coercion and Sworn Bond, 192-304.
[6] Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotso (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
[7] Donald F. Johnson, “Ambiguous Allegiances: Urban Loyalties during the American Revolution.” Journal of American History. (December 2017): 610-11, 614, 616-17, 623-625; Linda K. Kerber. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986), xi, 7-9, 48-51, 119, 121, 124-30, 132-36, 269.
[8] Kerber, 87, 269; Petition or Rachel Wells, May 18, 1786. Papers of the Continental Congress, (M-247), Roll 56, Item 42: VIII, 354-55. https://njwomenshistory.org/learn/topics/petition-rachel-lovell-wells/. I would like to thank Dr. J.E. Morgan for bringing this document to my attention.
[9] Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 342-3; John Dickinson to Col. Israel Williams. Hatfield [Massachusetts] May 23, 1775; Elijah Morton to Col. Israel Williams. Hatfield [Massachusetts] June 12, 1775; State of Massachusetts Bay. For the House of Representatives. April 15, 1777; General Court of Massachusetts to Israel Williams March 10, 1777. Israel Williams Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society. Articles alledg’d against the Hon[or]ble Israel Williams, Esq. Israel Williams Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society. Thomas Hutchinson to Col. Israel Williams. Boston. 23 February 1774; State of Massachusetts Bay. For the House of Representatives. April 15, 1777; General Court of Massachusetts to Israel Williams March 10, 1777; Committee of Correspondence for the Town of Hatfield to the General Court of Massachusetts. Hatfield [Massachusetts] March 29, 1777. Israel Williams Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society: Leonard L. Richards, Shay’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 101; Murphy, Coercion and Sworn Bond, 297-298.
[10]Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 344; Hatfield Town Meeting. Instructions to ye Representatives of Hatfield. Hatfield May 15, 1780. Israel Williams Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society; Murphy, Coercion and Sworn Bond, 298-299.
[11] Hoerder, Crowd Action, 344; Israel Williams and Israel Williams Junior. To the People of Hatfield that may or shall be in Town Meeting assembled this 22 of May 1780; To the People of Hatfield that may or shall be in Town Meeting assembled this Jan 10, 1780: William Williams [to Israel Williams] on the Free School at W[ilia]mstown. May 3, 1785; Israel Williams to Governor Bowdoin. June 20, 1785. Israel Williams Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society; Murphy, Coercion and Sworn Bond, 298-299.
[12] Pearl, 300, 305; Newport (Rhode Island) October 9, 1786…The following Draught of an Act…[Newport], Southwick and Barber, [1786], Evans Fiche 44937.; Harold M. Hyman, To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), 114-116; Thompson Westcott. Names of Persons who took the Oath of Allegiance to the State of Pennsylvania, Between the Years 1777 and 1789, with A History of the “Test Laws” of Pennsylvania. (John Campbell, Philadelphia, 1865), xxxii, xl.; Benjamin Rush. Considerations on the Present Test Law. Philadelphia, Hall, and Sellers, 1784. Evans Fiche 18770; Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America. (New York: The New Press, 2010): 156-8.
[13] Annette Gordon-Reed, “The Contract for America,” in Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty, eds. Patrick Griffin and Francis Cogliano (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021), 334-339; Andrew Trees, The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character (Princeton University Press, 2004): 6-9; Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 13-15, 132, 98-100, 104, 107-8, 112-17, 119-29, 136-8.
[14] Tara Strauch, “Taking Oaths and Giving Thanks: Ritual and Religion in Revolutionary America” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2013), retrieved from http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/1481, 1-2, 89-91; Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to put Christ into the Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016): 1-2, 4, 6-7, 36, 55-57, 157-8; James H. Hutson, Church and State in America: The First Two Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 136-47; Benjamin Rush considered the Constitution divinely sanctioned, but most Federalists avoided this type of language. Ireland, Religion, Ethnicity and Politics, 104-5, 119.
[15] Hatch, 17, 24, 44, 86-7, 152-5; For a contrast with the earlier notion of mere “toleration,” see Ned C. Landsman, Crossroads of Empire: The Middle Colonies in British North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 114-17, 122-124 and Ned C. Landsman. “Roots, Routes, And Rootedness: Diversity, Migration, and Toleration in Mid-Atlantic Pluralism.” Early American studies. 2, no. 2 (2004): 268–269, 273, 283; Chris Beneke attributes this change to Enlightenment influences, but additional influences can be found in the excesses of the Revolutionary War and the political struggles of the early republic Chris Beneke. “Not by Force or Violence: Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, and the Rights of Conscience in the Early National United States,” In Between Sovereignty and Anarchy, 80-1, 90-1, 93-95, 98, 100, 101.
[16] Murphy, Coercion and Sworn Bond, 247-303, 316-322; For the discussion of oaths as weapons, see Gray, Oaths, and the English Reformation, 181, 218.
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