Hitting the Books: America might not exist if not for a pre-Revolution smallpox outbreak
Creating a Critical Mass
On December 15, 1774, Reverend Samuel Williams of Bradford, Massachusetts, was invited to Salem by Reverend Asa Dunbar to deliver a Thanksgiving sermon before the congregation of the First Church. Williams titled his sermon “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country,” and it was preached and then published in the tense months between the announcement of Britain’s Coercive Acts in the summer of 1774 and the first shots at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.
Popular mobilization for the war of independence required Americans in thirteen distinct colonies, possessing “different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions and different manners,” to imagine a shared culture that needed defending.
Throughout his sermon in Salem, Williams toyed with his audience about which country he was professing to love, Britain or America. He was speaking the day before the anniversary of the Destruction of the Tea in Boston Harbor. In retaliation for that destruction, Parliament had closed Boston Harbor with the Boston Port Act and altered how Massachusetts communities could conduct their own affairs and town meetings in the Massachusetts Government Act.
Williams understood that his words mattered in this moment, as the people of Salem, which had been regarded — often derisively — as a center of loyalism in Massachusetts, considered how they would react to the inevitable crisis in the months to come. The minister established that people should love all mankind as they love God, but that there was a particular love that people should have for their own country.
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