George III, by Christopher Hibbert, Basic Books, 1998, 464 pp.; $28

Sweet Land of Liberty: The Ordeal of the American Revolution in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, by Francis S. Fox, Penn State University Press, 2000, 211 pp.; $29.95

A lot of ordinary people were caught up in the American War for Independence, and a surprising number of them were of German extraction. Some, like the King of England, who conversed with his wife in German all their days, have been the subject of many books. Others, like the residents of Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where 85 percent of the county's 15,000 residents came from Germany, have not. To come once again at the question of the morality of the American Revolution but from an unfamiliar perspective—through the experiences of George III, who is deftly portrayed in Christopher Hibbert's personal biography, and of the Northampton residents, whose story Francis Fox opens up for the first time in his pathbreaking book—is to be reminded of the moral complexities that extraordinary times brought to the lives of ordinary people.

The German angle shared by these books is no more than an intriguing sidelight. George III kept self-consciously loyal to the German principality of Hanover, whose Elector he remained during his years as Britain's monarch, and he dispatched all but one of his sons to Hanover for part of their education, but he never paid a visit to these German lands. The German background of the settlers in Northampton County functioned usually as a negative reference point. Dissatisfaction with the Old World had propelled them to the New. Once having left behind the economic, religious, domestic, or political circumstances that made Germany unattractive, these migrants valued most about their new life in North America the chance to be left alone while they started a new life. When the War for Independence forced the German migrants of Northampton County to think directly about their political tie to the German-descended king of England, and when that monarch took notice of the colonists whose numbers included the Northampton immigrants, things German were not in the forefront of their thinking.

Yet what was in the forefront, as depicted in these two books, was not what we might expect. In both cases the Revolutionary War brought unexpected transformations. The conflict that transformed George III—an earnest Christian, devoted husband and father, and conscientious ruler—into a despotic ogre worked a change of similar magnitude for the much more obscure citizens of Northampton County. In George's case, the change was a matter of perception; in Northampton County, where the Revolution was marked by anything but the triumph of liberty, the changes came in response to opportunity. In both cases, the actual unfolding of events as viewed by historians more than two centuries later was strikingly at odds with popular interpretations at the time.

As Hibbert's life of George III spells out in considerable detail, the third of the Hanoverians to reign as British monarch was an unlikely candidate for the enormities with which he was charged in the American Declaration of Independence. Even when recognizing that the Declaration was never intended as a disinterested account of the actual facts in dispute between the 13 colonies and the mother country—as almost everyone at the time realized—even, that is, when the Declaration is considered as an artful bit of propaganda, its depiction of George III still amounts to an unusually violent denunciation.

For the purpose of assessing the morality of the war that produced the United States of America, it helps to remember that the critical paragraph of the Declaration—beginning "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal"—ended with the assertion that "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states." Most of the rest of the Declaration was devoted to justifying that claim.

Since public declamation of the Declaration is not common now, it is useful to recall the extremity of its denunciation. In its graphic terms, George III "has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries [most, as it happens, from Hanover, with only a few "Hessians" from Hesse-Cassel] to complete the work of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages." After very much more of the same, the conclusion about George comes as no surprise: "A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

And so to Christopher Hibbert's biography, where (not surprisingly) a very different figure appears. The historical George III turns out to have been relatively moderate on the American question. When in 1769 one of his ministers proposed withdrawing Massachusetts' charter in response to a provocative assertion of rights by its legislature, George counseled restraint and sought a non-confrontational solution. Later, especially after the Boston "Tea Party" of December 1773, George did come to share the belief of his Prime Minister Lord North, a large majority in Parliament, and leading public Britons like Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, and John Wesley that firmness was required in dealing with the colonies in order to preserve the rule of law, defend property rights, and counteract government by mob rule. But even in that commitment George himself remained fairly moderate with respect to his revolting subjects. He continued for several years to look for a solution that would have acceded to many patriot demands while preserving the principle of Parliamentary supremacy over the colonies, and he oversaw orders to British military commanders that were much milder than those later issued to deal with the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

One of the reasons that a peaceful solution could not be found was, to be sure, George's own relative insensitivity to colonial realities. While he was attentive to reports from his Board of Trade and Secretary of State for the Colonies, he was never an astute judge of political talent. Friendship and personal loyalty counted for more in selecting ministers like Lord North than their political wisdom or ability to work with the era's sharply divided political factions. In addition, George's own efforts at playing a constructive role in governmental affairs often backfired by upsetting precedents, procedures, and conventions that had developed under the benign neglect of his Hanoverian predecessors.

George, in other words, was an occasionally inept ruler. But he was in no sense a fiendish tyrant. To the contrary, he was a notably serious defender of moral values in public and in private. One of the reasons he distrusted American protests over their rights came from his own rude dealings with John Wilkes, a likable but also scabrous sybarite who parlayed yellow journalism, demagogic rabble-rousing, and a leveling political philosophy into election as a member of Parliament. "Wilkes and Liberty" was the great cry that arose when Parliament refused to seat this political radical, and the extreme, even atheistic connotations of that cry were very much in the king's mind when he received the colonists' protests about their violated freedoms. Similarly, George resisted making Charles James Fox a Parliamentary minister not so much because of Fox's well-reasoned arguments in favor of the American patriots, but because Fox was a profligate gambler, openly disdained religion, and publicly kept a mistress.

For his own part, George was probably the most straightforwardly pious of the major political figures of his age. He read the Bible and attended Anglican prayers daily, at his coronation he deliberately removed his crown before taking Communion, he observed Sunday as a reverent holy day, he exhorted (ineffectually) his sons to seek God as their highest good, he admired John Wesley and the Countess of Huntingdon for their evangelical convictions, he gave a steady stream of charity to the poor, after his eyesight failed he was able to recite the alternating verses of the Psalms read at daily worship, and even when he had become irreversibly non compos mentis the habits of a lifetime endured (though sometimes with bizarre variations, as on the occasion when he administered the sacrament to himself). In 1795 George was being driven to Parliament when an unruly crowd surrounded his carriage and a window was broken by a projectile shot or thrown in anger. The king's retinue was all in a dither, but he remained entirely calm, and shortly thereafter said, "Well … one person is proposing this, and another is supposing that, forgetting that there is One above us all who disposes of everyone and on whom alone we depend."

For the sake of comparison, the United States did not have a president who shared as fully the beliefs and practices of traditional orthodox Christianity until after the Civil War and the election of Rutherford B. Hays and James A. Garfield. The comparison is doubly apt, for like the British monarch these presidents were politicians of ordinary intellect and ordinary capabilities. The George III portrayed by Christopher Hibbert was not Britain's brightest or wisest leader but, in terms of ordinary decency, he was, the polemics of the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, one of the best.

Francis Fox's Sweet Land of Liberty also turns conventional ascriptions upside down, but for a class of people very different from the king and his circle. At the time of the Revolution, Northampton County, Pennsylvania, was a newly organized political entity north of Philadelphia and stretching westward from the Delaware River; its three main towns were Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton. Among the many German settlers who had moved into the area from the 1730s were a number of Moravians and Mennonites, pacifists for whom the Revolution would pose especially perilous choices.

Fox's book, the product of extraordinarily thorough research in local Pennsylvania records, is made up entirely of personal vignettes. Several of the chapters are short since they concern people who only just nudged into the public record. Such ones include Michael Ohl, who was German Reformed but who dared to offer kind words about the Moravians whom some ardent patriots were attacking for not supporting the Revolutionary effort with sufficient ardor. For his pains Ohl was twice clapped into prison and assessed heavy fines. Another was Joseph Romig, from a Moravian family but not himself a practicing Moravian, who had to become a wandering vagabond when he was forced out of his home by freebooting militiamen.

The individuals for whom most documentation is available and whose biographies are presented at greatest length were those who organized the county militia at the request of the patriotic legislature of the new state of Pennsylvania. The legislators in Philadelphia wanted military help for fighting on two fronts—against the main British army under General Howe which menaced Philadelphia, and against the British and Indian forces who were a threat to the North and who on July 3, 1778, massacred more than 100 patriot soldiers and civilians at Wyoming, Pennsylvania, 65 miles northwest of Easton.

Once the Northampton militia was raised, however, it turned out to be much more interested in tyrannizing neighbors than in fending off the British. Fox's longest chapters document the actions of County Lieutenant John Wetzel, Justice Frederich Limbach, and Henry Geiger, who became the Colonel of Northampton's Second Battalion. For these men, the Revolutionary War ushered in a period of great and unanticipated opportunity, but not in the terms with which the Declaration of Independence addressed George III or the Pennsylvania assembly called to arms. For them it was rather, in Fox's phrase, "an era where suspicion and persecution of one's neighbors became a blood sport."

What the Revolution allowed Wetzel, Limbach, Geiger, and their subordinates to grasp was primarily the lands and goods of those who for religious reasons refused to mobilize for war or who hesitated at committing themselves to the patriot cause. The Militia Act and the Test Act that the Pennsylvania legislature passed in order to mobilize support for the new government became in the hands of these local leaders cruel instruments of oppression. Both acts provided for fines and the sale of personal property when citizens refused to either register for military duty or sign an oath supporting the new government.

When these provisions came into play, they offered a double opportunity for men on the make: they provided cash to pay militiamen for their service, and they offered desirable goods at cheap prices. Even when the new Pennsylvania government expressly requested local officials to go easy on Moravian and Mennonite farmers, whom almost everyone regarded as inoffensive citizens, the Northampton militiamen still did what they could to, again in Fox's phrase, "feather their own nests." If there is a hero in Fox's book, it is John Ettwein, the Moravians' bishop, who used all legal means and a wide variety of personal contacts, to protect his people and other reluctant patriots.

The rawest exercise of "patriot liberty" occurred in the summer of 1778, when with precipitate haste the militia fell on about a dozen Mennonite families in Upper Saucon township. The men from these families were hailed to Easton, where they were asked to take the loyalty oath. When from religious scruple they refused, Justice Limbach ordered them to forfeit their property and leave Pennsylvania within 30 days. Protests and appeals to Philadelphia were lost in the confusion surrounding the Wyoming massacre. As many as 2,000 bargain-hunters attended a series of auctions held in late August and early September at which the Mennonites' livestock, grain, tools, books (including Bibles), whiskey, and household furniture were sold out from under them. Fox's summary is not pretty: "the auctions stranded eleven Mennonite families in empty houses that had been stripped of every object that could be removed and sold, from spools of threat to heirlooms that had been carried across the Atlantic. … Not a morsel of bread had been left for the children. … Some of the men's wives were pregnant and would soon give birth."

Fox himself does not expatiate on the personal stories he has reconstructed with such care, but his book is provided with a brief, powerful afterword by Michael Zuckerman, a distinguished historian of early America at the University of Pennsylvania. To Zuckerman, Fox's research provides "a new and altogether more disturbing Revolution than we have been accustomed to reckon with." Put most starkly, this was a Revolution fought for general principles of liberty that resulted in gross abuses against liberty in Northampton County, Pennsylvania.

The word in season from these illuminating books should not be taken as a mindless revisionism supplanting a mindless patriotism. Although George III was in fact a decent, honorable man, his virtues could not overcome the British bungling that must bear considerable responsibility for the American War of Independence. Likewise, it cannot be concluded from the savagery in the name of liberty that was perpetrated on law-abiding and God-fearing Northampton citizens that patriots lacked legitimate causes for revolt. But what the accounts of these two books can do is alert modern American readers to the moral contingencies of our Revolution. To at least some degree, judgments about the morality of that war, along with judgments concerning those who took part in it on both sides, depended on how the war came out. To at least some degree, the Revolution was "right"—and the uplifting interpretations of the Revolution as construed by generations of loyal Americans have been "right"—because of who at the end of the day wielded the most effective "might."

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Blackwell).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase:

• George III, by Christopher Hibbert
• Sweet Land of Liberty, by Francis S. Fox

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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