Free America's Prophet by Bruce Feiler Page A

to call off the war. “Heis saying, ‘George, I know you. Put an end to this before it becomes a travesty,’” Safford said. “‘The British are going to destroy you and slaughter these young men. Congress is leading you astray.’” But Washington found the letter a “ridiculous, illiberal performance” and released it to Congress. Duché, the hero of 1776, was finished, forced to seek exile in England. Years later he returned to Philadelphia a broken and forgotten man, buried in an unmarked grave.
    How quickly a Moses can fall.
    I asked Tim Safford if he thought Duché failed the leadership moment.
    “I don’t. I’m his successor, and I think the life of a pastor is trying to hold very distant poles in some sort of tension with each other. Loyalty to the Crown, loyalty to the freedom movement of Washington. Granted, in that moment, he’s more like the Israelites complaining in the desert. It’s a greater Moses moment for Washington. But like a lot of preachers, Duché never gives up hope that justice can be served without killing people. He inspires me.”
     
    BACK UPSTAIRS WE settled in the stark white sanctuary with the worn stone floor. I wanted to press Safford on why he thought the Moses narrative was so prevalent during the Revolution. Duché was hardly the only person to invoke the biblical hero. If anything, the Exodus became the lingua franca of the casus belli.
    As early as 1760, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale, stressed that God “is now giving this land to us who in virtue of the ancient covenant are the Seed of Abraham.” He urged all Americans to read the story of their past in Deuteronomy 26:6–9. “The Lord freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm andawesome power, and by signs and portents. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” In 1765, John Adams wrote that he always considered the settlement of America “the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”
    The themes these orators drew from the Exodus were similar to the ones the Puritans and Great Awakening preachers had emphasized: Freedom is a God-given right; God promises liberation to the oppressed; God freed the Israelites from Egypt, and he can free the colonists. But the new generation of Exodus-lovers went further, insisting that the Bible expressly rejects the British form of government, the divine right of kings, and endorses the kinds of freedom the patriots were proposing. In 1775, Samuel Langdon, the president of Harvard, said Americans should adopt the form of government that God handed down to Moses on Sinai. “The Jewish government,” he wrote, “was a perfect republic.”
    Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Samuel Sherwood’s The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness, both published in 1776, invoked the Moses story to make similar attacks on the English political system. Paine was the antireligious zealot who continually cited religious examples. He hated Scripture but quoted it relentlessly, showing the enduring power of the Bible even for deists. In Common Sense he cites Gideon, Samuel, and David, to show how the Bible argues against kingship. And he calls King George III a pharaoh. “No man was a warmer wisher for reconciliation than myself, before the fatal nineteenth of April 1775, but the moment the event of that day was made known, I rejected the hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England for ever.”
    Sherwood, a Connecticut pastor, calls on the same biblical passages that John Cotton quotes on the Arbella to argue that America’srevolutionary leaders are finally fulfilling the promise of the Puritans. He quotes God’s message to the Israelites in the Sinai: “Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself.”
    [God] was not conducting them from a land