Matthew Stewart is an independent scholar based in Boston. This article is adapted from his most recent book, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. Copyright © 2014 by Matthew Stewart. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

How do we decide who deserves a place in history? Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party—the one in Boston Harbor. And he went on from there to help kick off the Revolution in Pennsylvania, co-write the first modern constitution, and name the state of Vermont. The reason he isn’t well remembered today is just this: The grandfather of today’s Tea Party was an atheist in all but name.

Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England. As a teenager, he taught himself enough to become a successful doctor.


In 1764, at the age of 33, Young published his first screed championing the rights of “the common people” of the colonies against the injustices of imperial rule. In 1765, while living in Albany, he played a starring role in the protests against the newly passed Stamp Act, which put a tax on printed colonial goods, including newspapers, pamphlets and playing cards, and rose to the leadership of the local chapter of the Sons of Liberty. In 1766, Young moved to Boston to join with the radical faction gathering around James Otis and Samuel Adams. He rapidly established himself as the group’s most militant voice in the local newspapers and the go-to man whenever a rabble stood in need of rousing. Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, a Boston-born loyalist, regularly named Young as one of the most dangerous men in town.

In 1772, together with his fellow radicals, Young founded the Boston Committee of Correspondence. Formally, it was just a letter-writing extension of the traditional Town Meeting, an assembly of local citizens; informally, it was the people’s liberation organization of Boston. “What an engine!” John Adams exclaimed many years later. “The history of the United States can never be written” until one has inquired into the activities of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, he said. “France imitated it, and produced a revolution. England and Scotland were upon the point of imitating it, in order to produce another revolution. … The history of the past 30 years is a sufficient commentary upon it.” And Young’s handwriting was all over the project—quite literally. In the files now held in the archives of the New York Public Library, his distinctive script appears on dozens of unsigned pages of committee papers—more than any other committee member—including on parts of a draft of the 1772 declaration of the “Rights of the Colonists” that Adams later suggested was one of the models for the Declaration of Independence.

Dr. Thomas Young | Library of Congress

At the decisive Boston town meeting of Nov. 29, 1773, while ships loaded with cargo from the East India Company idled in the harbor, Thomas Young was the first and only speaker to propose that the best way to protest the new Tea Act was to dump the tea into the water. Two weeks later, after Governor Hutchinson declined the meeting’s request to turn the ships away, the rest of the town coalesced around Young’s plan. On the evening of Dec. 16, 1773, Young kept a crowd of thousands at the Old South Church shouting and clapping with a satirical speech on “the ill effects of tea on the constitution” while his best friends, dressed as Mohawks, quietly set off to turn Boston Harbor into a briny teapot. Decades later, when the last surviving “Mohawk” was asked to name the leaders of the movement, Young’s name was the first on his lips.

In 1775, Young tumbled into Philadelphia and instantly fell in with Thomas Paine and a group of like-minded revolutionaries. At the time, the government of Pennsylvania was mostly under the control of conservatives who favored reconciliation with Great Britain—that was, until May 1776, when Young and his gang engineered a Bolshevik-style coup d’état that replaced the legitimately elected government of the province with a pro-independence faction. The new government in turn tilted the balance of the Continental Congress in favor of permanent separation from the Crown, and within six weeks the Congress declared independence.

In the summer and fall of 1776, Young and comrades organized a convention and produced a constitution for the newly independent state of Pennsylvania. With a declaration of individual rights, an annually elected unicameral legislature, and universal manhood suffrage, it was “the most radically democratic organic law in the world at the time of its creation,” one historian has observed. Benjamin Franklin handed out copies in Paris, and the people of the salons assumed that such a revolutionary document could only have been the great scientist’s work. But, as John Adams groused, angry that Franklin was getting all the credit, the real authors were Young and his friends. Young sent a copy together with an open letter to the people of Vermont—a state whose name he himself coined from the French for “Green Mountain.” There, with some further modification, it served as the basis for the first state constitution to ban slavery.

Yet when Young died suddenly of an illness in 1777 while serving as a doctor in the Continental Army, he all but vanished from American history. In 1970, the historian David Freeman Hawke named him “unquestionably the most unwritten about man of distinction of the American Revolution.” Apart from a couple of worthy pieces of scholarship in recent years, the claim remains mostly true.

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What did Thomas Young do wrong by history? The first thing to know about Young is that he was a committed democrat (with a small “d”). By birth, by reputation and by conviction, he was a man of the people. In Boston he saved his highest praise for the “common tradesmen” who at town meetings displayed, as he described in a letter to one of his friends, “the wisdom and eloquence of Athenian Senators.” As a member of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, he demanded the overthrow of all those county and town governments that put “the most powerful men” over “the common people.” In Philadelphia he invited the hatred of the ruling classes with his bold proposal that all men should be entitled to vote without regard to the property they owned. He made matters still worse by advocating for policies—like a cap on maximum estate size—that would have involved a redistribution of wealth in what was at the time one of the most in-egalitarian colonies in America. (The wealth cap and redistribution proposals were never adopted.)

The elites of the time, not surprisingly, came down hard on the hero of the people. Young was a “firebrand” and an “incendiary of the lower order,” they said; he was a man “of noisy fame,” the last word in “boorishness and impertinent loquacity,” and “the great Apollo of the ignorant.” The famous Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, who worked alongside Young in both medicine and politics for a time, eventually turned on his former colleague and accused him of leading a “mobocracy.” Young had no family pedigree, no formal educational credentials and no money in a society that placed enormous value on all three—and his enemies never let him forget that.

After the revolutionary summer passed, the Philadelphia oligarchs recaptured control of Pennsylvania politics and swiftly consigned the people’s constitution of 1776, along with the memory of Thomas Young, to the ash heap of history.

The biggest obstacle that stood between Thomas Young and the history books, however, was his religion—or alleged lack thereof. According to the received wisdom of his contemporaries, Young was an avowed “infidel”—the moral equivalent of an atheist. “Could we raise up the spirit of one of the murderers of St. Stephen, to tell us what a figure Paul cut, when he breathed out threatening and slaughter against his Savior, then we might form an idea of Dr. Young,” said one outraged Tory. “Suffice it to say, this man stands accused of rebellion, not only against his Sovereign, but against his God.”

And Young—this is perhaps the most unusual thing about him—regularly responded with daring public statements in which he let it be known, in so many words, that his enemies were right. In a number of newspaper essays, anonymously published pamphlets and uncomfortably personal confessions, he announced that he was not a Christian but a “deist.” What he meant by that was something quite radical indeed.

The universe, said Young, is infinite, eternal and everywhere abounding in life. There is no other world, no heaven but the starry sky above, no hell but the fictions that other people create. There is a deity, worthy of great praise, but it acts only according to reason and through the laws of nature. It has no need for holy books, prophets or priests. It is ultimately indistinguishable from its creation: nature itself. The study of nature, or science, is the only acceptable form of worship. Morality is grounded entirely in nature. And the moral life is itself the only religion worth the name.

Young called his creed “the religion of nature” and “the religion of nature’s God.” And he made abundantly clear that, in his own mind, this radical philosophical religion was the axis on which the Revolution turned. For him, the project to free the American people from the yoke of King George III was part of a grander project to liberate the world from the ghostly tyranny of supernatural religion.

Young’s philosophy was in some ways just as unique as the man himself. And yet, while the synthesis was undoubtedly his, the pieces were not. In fact, the vocabulary, the arguments and the vision infused in his philosophy are all to be found in the books that he began to collect as a young man. Before it belonged to Thomas Young, the “religion of nature’s God” belonged to a string of philosophers stretching all the way back to ancient Greece.

All of that learning, however, could not rescue Young from his posthumous fate. Not long after he died, the nation he helped to establish rediscovered its earlier affinity for decidedly supernatural forms of religion. A new generation of spiritual leaders, the champions of the Great Awakening of the early 19th century, worked hard to forget or disguise the heresies of the nation’s founders. In the case of Young, they found it easiest to ignore him altogether. Let him now face the consequences in the afterlife whose reality he so blasphemously denied, they said.

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Thomas Jefferson was a big reader, too. In 1815, his massive personal library became the cornerstone of the Library of Congress. And it turns out that the books that mattered most to Jefferson were the same ones that inspired Thomas Young on his radical philosophical journey. Benjamin Franklin, too, was a bibliophile. And it was his encounter with the same collection of books as a young man that caused the people of Boston to identify him, too, as an “infidel” and an “atheist.” The same vocabulary, the same arguments, and the same vision show up in Ethan Allen’s remarkable book of 1784, Reason: The Only Oracle of Man. They emerge once again, with panache, in Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason of 1794.

America’s founders were a motley crew, to be sure, almost as eager to disagree with one another as to start a revolution, and often saying different things to different people. Still, taken on the whole and from a distance, one of the most striking facts about them was their disproportion inclination toward religious heresy or “infidelity,” and very specifically toward the kind of philosophical irreligion for which Thomas Young stood. If they tended to be less democratic with a small “d” and less outspoken in their philosophical statements than Young, this may have been less a matter of principle than of compromise. In the final analysis, the biggest difference between Young and his more famous fellow founders is just that he was willing to shout at the top of his lungs what they confined to student notebooks, communicated in code or announced to the world after their freedom to do so had been secured.

Open In New Window

Young’s unusual religion was never that of the majority of the American people, nor was it that of the United States, which by law has no official religion. Yet in 1776, it was the language of his radical philosophy that made its way into the new republic’s first founding document. The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence tells us that the people of the United States are entitled to govern themselves not in virtue of the laws of a Christian God or indeed any revealed authority at all, but only in accordance with “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” In 1826, in the last year of his life, Jefferson made clear his view that the declaration should be understood as “the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bring themselves.” It was an attempt to clear away the false and oppressive belief that “the grace of God” entitled “a favored few” to ride herd over the “mass of mankind.” The Declaration of Independence, in short, was a declaration of independence from all forms of tyranny over the human mind, beginning with the God delusion.

Thomas Young knew this all along. Maybe if we could bring his life and ideas back from the forgotten side of history, we could look forward to a modern version of the Tea Party—one that dispenses with the counter-revolutionary fraud of Christian nationalism and recovers something of the extraordinary philosophical radicalism with which the American experiment in self-government began.