The Sufferings of This People Cannot Be Circumscribed With Pen, Ink and Paper

Since I'd posted a letter from John Adams to Abigail yesterday, I decided to go back to that well and poke around her correspondence a bit.  Found this interesting tidbit from November 5, 1775:

I have been led to think from a late Defection that he who neglects his duty to his Maker, may well be expected to be deficient and insincere in his duty towards the public. Even suppose Him to possess a large share of what is called honour and publick Spirit yet do not these Men by their bad Example, by a loose immoral conduct corrupt the Minds of youth, and vitiate the Morrals of the age, and thus injure the publick more than they can compensate by intrepidity, Generosity and Honour?

Let revenge or ambition, pride, lust or profit tempt these Men to a base and vile action, you may as well hope to bind up a hungry tiger with a cobweb as to hold such debauched patriots in the visionary chains of Decency or to charm them with the intellectual Beauty of Truth and reason.

No, she wasn't referring to Trump, but rather one Reverend John Joachim Zubly, a pastor who came to America from Switzerland in the 1740s.  Dig what I found in the Swiss-American Historical Society. Newsletter (October 1976):

He participated in expressly forbidden provincial as well as continental assemblies; he not only condoned, but advocated the use of force; he voiced his disdain of British actions and called them infamous, tyrannical, and illegal not only in secret chambers, but publicly and in direct confrontation with established authorities. 

And yet, at the very time when Zubly prepared his last and most radical pronouncement, he experienced painful alienation from that body in whose work he had fully participated. In October 1775 he was publicly accused of being disloyal to the cause of America, in November he returned to Savannah, after informing his fellow delegates that he was "greatly indisposed". What had happened? What made Zubly, the staunch critic of British assumptions and actions and a forceful advocate of American rights, a near outcast? 

In the summer of 1775 the Continental Congress had taken two quite radical steps. In June it had named George Washington commander-in-chief of the rebel army; and on July 6 it had issued its bold "Declaration of the Causes and the Necessity of Taking Up Arms." Zubly supported these measures. But there he stopped like many fellow-delegates and suffered from an ever more apparent cleavage which split the Continental Congress into irreconcilable groups. Joseph Galloway¹ sketched them aptly, if in a partisan way, in these words:    

Upon the meeting of Congress, two parties were immediately formed, with different views, and determined to act on different principles. 

One intended candidly and clearly to define American rights and explicitly and dutifully to petition for the remedy which would redress the grievances justly complained of-, to form a more solid and constitutional union between the two countries, and avoid every measure which tended to sedition, or acts of violent opposition. 

The other consisted of persons whose design, from the beginning of their opposition to the Stamp Act, was to throw off all subordination and connection with Great Britain; who meant by every fiction, falsehood, and fraud to delude the people from their due allegiance, to throw the subsisting governments into anarchy, to incite the ignorant and vulgar to arms, and with those arms to establish American independence. 

The one were men of loyal principles and possessed the greatest fortunes in America; the other were Congregational and Presbyterian republicans, or men of bankrupt fortunes, overwhelmed with debt to the British merchants.      

Rev. John J. Zubly, although a staunch Presbyterian, was like Galloway among those of "loyal principles." From his first public statement on political matters to the last, he held consistently one tenet as sacred and inviolable...      

"The idea of a separation between America and Great Britain is big with so many and such horrid evils, that every friend to both must shudder at the thought. Every man that gives the most distant hint of such a wish, ought instantly to be suspected as a common enemy." But, Zubly lamented, "the breach is growing wider and wider, it is to become great like a sea". 

Zubly held fast to this view until his death. In July 1776, after independence had been declared in Jefferson's memorable words, Zubly was arrested by the Georgia Council of Safety. Although soon released, he was viewed with suspicion. 

In September 1777 he was requested to take the oath of allegiance to the government established by the separatists. He proudly refused and declared in an appeal to the grand jury such a demand "unconstitutional and tyrannical." 

He then fled to South Carolina. On March 1, 1778, Zubly was listed among those who were banished from Georgia, and half of his property was confiscated. In the spring of 1781 he returned to British-held Savannah where he died on July 23.

Cancel culture has gone too far, I tell ya.

Selah.

1 - We've met George Galloway before.

PS - A cute vignette from the end of AA's letter: "Master John is very anxious to write, but has been confined for several days with a severe cold which has given him soar Eyes, but he begs me to make his Excuse and say that he has wrote twice before, but it did not please him well enough to send it."