Franklin, Witherspoon, Jefferson and American National Law Against the Backdrop of English and Scottish Enlightenment Views of Mosaic Law, 1755–1800

This chapter covers the most important developments in American and related British thought on and (proposed) application of Mosaic Law within British and American legal history, from 1755 down to 1800. These include Benjamin Franklin’s attitudes toward and appropriations of Mosaic Law in the 1755 Pennsylvania Militia Law and beyond; Blackstone’s engagement with Mosaic Law in his highly influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–70); Mosaic Law in John Witherspoon’s theo-political philosophy (1768–92), at Princeton and beyond, which potentially influences a number of early American founding figures who studied under Witherspoon and graduated from Princeton; the turn to Mosaic-Levitical marriage laws by Thomas Jefferson and company in their post-Revolutionary Virginia state law reforms as an alternative to the now despised authority of English royal law which Blackstone represented (1779–86); a comparison of Jefferson’s and Franklin’s pragmatic-rationalist approaches to Mosaic-Levitical marriage laws within the Virginia law reforms and private correspondence respectively (1773–86); Samuel Langdon’s charge for Mosaic and broader biblical law to serve as a foundational source for the new Connecticut state Constitution in 1788; the appeal to Mosaic-Levitical Law in a court martial case in 1781 as part of the American Revolution where General George Washington had the final say; and the curious or perhaps not-so-curious absence of Mosaic Law in Thomas Paine’s vision of a new kingless republic in his tract on Common Sense (1776). All of these cases accord with the legal reforms instituted by the English crown within the American colonies across the eighteenth century and parallel religious and socio-political transformations taking place across the Atlantic in England and Europe during this same period.