America's Prophet by Bruce Feiler Read Free Book Online Page A

contribution was to introduce a language of dissent that emboldened people to challenge conventional truths and distant authorities. And what happened first in churches happened next in government. The Revolutionary period, preacher Horace Bushnell said, was marked by “Protestantism in religion producing republicanism in government.”
    This democratic notion of faith especially took hold in Philadelphia, where Benjamin Franklin was Whitefield’s biggest booster as well as his publisher. Between 1739 and 1741, more than half the books Franklin printed were by Whitefield. Pennsylvania had been a refuge for religious outsiders since its founding by William Penn in 1681. Penn nominally gave preferential treatment to Anglicans, but his guarantee of religious freedom attracted Germans, Swedes, Dutch, Mennonites, Amish, and Jews. His original frame of government failed and was replaced in 1701 with the Charter of Privileges, which provided for a resident governor, a small elective council, and a large assembly with limited powers. But the new formulation only made his life worse. “I am a crucified man between Injustice and Ingratitude [in America],” Penn said, “and Extortion and Oppression [in England].”
    By 1729, Pennsylvania had fallen into depression and the assembly voted to print its own paper currency. When the influx of money arrived, the assembly siphoned off a large chunk to erect a new assembly house, which they termed a “State-house” to emphasize their independence from the governor. Their plan called for a massive, Palladian-style building, 107 feet long and 45 feet deep, twice the size of the next-biggest building in Pennsylvania.
    “The colony was showing off with this building,” explained Diethorn, a bob-haired expert in colonial daily life. With encyclopedic knowledge of every molding, paint chip, and metallic compound, she could have taught the famously polymath Franklin a few things about being multifaceted. “They didn’t build this building to house the Continental Congress. They built it to rule an English colony. But the mix of grandeur and intimacy ended up aiding the American cause.”
    Inside, a large foyer is flanked by two gray rooms, forty feetsquare with twenty-foot ceilings, which were originally used for the Pennsylvania Assembly and Supreme Court. The Assembly Room is where the Declaration of Independence was debated and signed, and today the space is decorated with period Windsor chairs gathered around tables covered in green baize. Upstairs is a long, open room that runs the length of the building. When the British captured Philadelphia in 1777, the American officers imprisoned here grew so hungry that they threw down buckets to passing citizens and begged for food. Just off this hall is a locked wooden door that leads to the bell tower.
    In 1751, the Pennsylvania Assembly voted to procure a bell for the State House. With no suitable craftsmen in the colonies, Speaker Isaac Norris wrote the assembly’s representative in London to “get us a good Bell.”
    Let the Bell be cast by the best Workmen and examined carefully before it is Shipped with the following words well shaped in large letters round it viz:
    By order of the Assembly of the Province of Pensylvania for the Statehouse in the City of Philadelphia 1752.
    and Underneath
    Proclaim Liberty thro’ all the Land to all the Inhabitants Thereof Levit. XXV. 10.
    Little is known about Norris, except that he was a Quaker merchant who had studied in England and is said to have known Hebrew, Latin, and French. Even less is known about why he chose this specific inscription, especially considering that the bell would be heard by almost everyone but seen by virtually no one.
    Leviticus is the third of the Five Books of Moses. It is the least read and least loved of the Pentateuch and one of the most maligned of the Hebrew Bible. The English name Leviticus comes from the Latin “of the Levites,” the tribe of Moses’ mother.