How God Blessed America

I’ve been musing lately about the role of Providence in America’s Founding. For one reason, this is Holy Week, and the meditations about Passover, and the Christ’s Passion, grow more insistent with every passing day.

For another, I am writing a historical novel about the Founding Fathers — and one Founding Mother — and hope to have it published in time for our 250th Birthday on July 4, 2026. (More on this later.) In researching the book, I ran across this nugget.

After the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to design a new emblem for the new nation. In August, Franklin presented this idea.

It depicted Pharaoh (read King George III), sword in hand, chasing rebellious Jews who were fleeing slavery, as Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea to ease their escape. Most Founders thought the Book of Exodus an apt metaphor for the American Revolution, although Jefferson’s seal would have used a different image: the Jews wandering the desert for 40 years, following a cloud by day and fire by night.

Both Franklin and Jefferson, despite being tagged by critics as deists, meaning they believed in a Creator but not necessarily someone to pray to, embraced the same slogan: ‘Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God.’ In fact Jefferson liked the slogan so much he used it as a seal for his personal correspondence.

Being contrary from the beginning, Congress rejected their ideas, and appointed several other committees, and did not approve the final design — the one we still have — until 1782. It was designed by Charles Thomson and William Barton. They selected the bald eagle as our symbol — this Franklin objected to, writing his daughter, “I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character.” And they deleted the Biblical reference to the Exodus story.

The new committee did, however, incorporate into the emblem three Latin phrases that had been suggested by Franklin and Jefferson (Adams’ preferred metaphor was to the Hercules, who chose the Goddess of Virtue over the Goddess of Beauty) . They are: E Pluribus Unam (From Many, One), Novus Ordo Seclorum (New Order of the Ages) and Annuit Coeptis (He Shined His Light On This Work).

To most of the men and women of the Founding Generation, there was no question — and plenty of evidence — that Providence had blessed our union, during the Revolutionary War and beyond. The idea that a ragtag group of volunteer soldiers, many gathered from local Sons of Liberty soldiers in colonial militias, poorly supplied by a Congress that had no central treasury with which to tax states to pay for war, could topple the greatest empire, with the mightiest Navy of its day, and real Red Coat uniforms was hard to imagine, then or now, without Divine Intervention.

For instance, the Continental Army was housed for the winter of 1777-1778 in Valley Forge, PA. Washington’s 9,000 soldiers had just suffered a major defeat, when British troops captured the American provincial capital of Philadelphia. During their six months in Valley Forge, some 2,000 American soldiers died from cold, hunger, and disease. In letters likely written by his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton, the General pleaded with Congress and the states to send supplies.

In later depictions of their winter of woes, Washington was often pictured on one knee, praying to God. Then Ben Franklin, serving as the colonies’ diplomatic envoy to France, recruited Baron van Steuben, a former Prussian general who fell from favor because of his homosexuality, to go to America and volunteer for Washington’s Army. Meeting up in Valley Forge, Van Steuben drilled and trained the men in professional military tactics. By the time they left Valley Forge, they were a fighting force.

When Benedict Arnold became a spy for the British, Washington called it a providential design that Arnold’s plan was discovered just in time, in late September 1780, right before Arnold turned over to the British the plans for one of the most important forts on the Hudson River. As George Washington wrote: “Happily the treason has been timely discovered to prevent the fatal misfortune. The providential train of circumstances which led to it affords the most convincing proof that the Liberties of America are the object of divine Protection.”

Even after the country was formed, its Constitution ratified, its Bill of Rights enacted, Providence seemed still to be keeping a watchful eye.

On July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of one another — one at Monticello, VA, the other in Quincy. Rep. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, one of the nation’s greatest orators, delivered a two-hour-long eulogy in Boston that saw in their deaths a sign that God was protecting the nation. “As their lives themselves were the gifts of Providence, who is not willing to recognize in their happy termination, as well as in their long continuance, proofs that our country and its benefactors are objects of His care?” Webster asked.

Now, we are the oldest democracy in the world, and many is the nation that was founded on our principles, on our values, on our natural rights. The last few years have challenged this narrative of Providential favor, filled with crime, prejudice and tyranny, repression of free speech and hatred of Jews, white males and women.

And then there came Donald Trump’s escape from an assassin’s bullet in Butler, PA, and his election in 2024, despite the weaponized lawfare of a desperate elite, and the marvel that maybe, just maybe, God had intervened to save us again.

At this time of redemption, let us pray that America has somehow restored favor in the eyes of our Creator, shining a light, watching over, blessing us.

Joy to you this Easter.