“Going Dutch with the American Founders” by John Witte, Jr.

Last page of the Union of Utrecht, 1579, Nationaal Archief (US-PD)

This article is part of a forthcoming series on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

---

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume on The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn pointed to five major sources that helped drive the American revolutionaries and early constitutional framers from 1763 to 1791– classical Greek and Roman writings on law, politics, and history; early Enlightenment social contract theories from England and France; English common laws of liberty going back to Magna Carta; radical Leveller tracts against royal autocracy that poured out during the English civil war; and Puritan New England’s covenantal constructions of church, state, and society. Bailyn made clear that most American founders were eclectic, even aphoristic in their reading of these sources — particularly in the hurried pamphlets and harried speeches issued in the heady days of revolution and constitutional debate. He also made clear that his was not an exhaustive list of sources, but these were the most common sources he encountered in his early pathbreaking work on American revolutionary writings.

In the sixty years since Bailyn’s classic title, historians have lifted up sundry other ideological sources that also helped to shape revolutionary and early America: civic republicanism, Whig radicalism, Quaker communitarian, Baptist separationism, Calvinist resistance theories, Methodist social teachings, Free(d) Black liberation movements, political Hebraism, and a veritable symphony of religious and philosophical accounts of natural law and natural rights. Other historians have pointed to the distinct influence of other nations beyond England and France on which Bailyn had focused – Scottish common sense philosophies, Spanish neo-Thomist writings, Italian legal humanism, German constitutional and associational theories, and more. 

One important source of the American founding that is often forgotten is the Netherlands, which had an outsized influence on the founders. New Amsterdam (before becoming New York) offered the American founders a striking early example of religious toleration akin to the better-known examples of colonial Rhode Island, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Dutch seaports launched tens of thousands of emigrants to America, many armed with books on rights and liberties that Dutch publishers could produce with far greater freedom from censorship than other countries. Leading founders like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams spent extended time in the Netherlands during and after the revolution. Dutch banks provided critical funding to the early American revolutionaries, and Dutch traders sent them so many supplies that England eventually declared a retaliatory war on the Netherlands, too. And the Dutch Republic was one of the very first nations to recognize the new United States of America and provided vital trans-Atlantic diplomacy to help build new alliances for the young nation. 

More striking still were the close analogies that the American founders saw between the sixteenth-century Dutch revolt against Spain, and the American revolution against England. Much like colonial America two centuries later, the Netherlands was ruled by a foreign monarch – in their case, the Spanish emperor, Philip II who was also titled Lord of the Netherlands. In the 1560s, Philip abruptly imposed a series of increasingly onerous acts against the Dutch – heavy new taxes and tariffs, stifling commercial regulations, officious new royal tribunals and appellate procedures, sweeping military conscriptions of Dutch men and boys, forced quartering of Spanish soldiers in Dutch homes and farms, and more. All this was in open breach of various charters of rights and liberties that had governed the Netherlands since the fourteenth century. Much worse, Philip unleashed the terrifying Spanish Inquisition in the Netherlands, ultimately slaughtering thousands and confiscating massive amounts of private property in a determined effort to root out Dutch Protestantism and to impose the sweeping new decrees of the Catholic Council of Trent. 

In the later 1560s and 1570s, the Dutch rose up in violent revolt. Under the inspired leadership of Prince William of Orange and others, they put into rapid action the Calvinist principles of rights, resistance, and revolution that had already driven their coreligionists to revolt against their tyrannical oppressors in France and Scotland. Whipped up by thunderous sermons and hundreds of new pamphlets issued in defiance of the Spanish censors, the Dutch Calvinists waged bloody war against Spain and its allies in land and sea campaigns that would flare up intermittently for decades until finally settled by the 1648 religious Peace of Westphalia. 

Already in 1579, the seven Dutch provinces signed the Union of Utrecht to form a confederation, and to create a provisional national government to consolidate and coordinate their military, diplomatic, commercial, taxation, and related efforts. Rather like the Articles of Confederation forged by the American Continental Congress two centuries later, the Union of Utrecht preserved the political and legal sovereignty of each province, while creating a national Estates-General with enumerated powers. The Union guaranteed respect for “the special and particular privileges, freedoms, exemptions, laws, statutes, laudable and traditional customs, usages, and all other rights of each province and of each town, member, and inhabitant of these provinces” and pledged that any violation of them “shall be decided by ordinary courts of justice, arbiters, or amicable settlement.” The Union also guaranteed each of the seven Dutch provinces independent authority over religion and the church, but on condition that every province preserve freedom of conscience for all peaceable faiths, including Catholics, Jews, and the occasional Muslim traders in the port cities. 

In 1581, even as the military battles still raged, the Estates-General of the Netherlands issued a Declaration of Independence (called “the Act of Abjuration”) against the “Spanish tyrant” as they called Philip II. Rather like the 1776 American Declaration, the 1581 Dutch Declaration proclaimed:

[I]in accordance with the law of nature and in order to preserve and defend ourselves and our fellow-countrymen, our rights, the privileges and ancient customs and the freedom of our fatherland, and the life and honor of our wives, children, and posterity, so that we may not become the Spaniard’s slaves, and forsaking the King of Spain with good right, we have been compelled to devise and practice other means which seem to provide better for the greater safety and preservation of our aforesaid rights, privileges, and liberties. 

The Dutch Declaration recited the constitutional conditions and grievances that had compelled the people and provinces to revolt against Spain. They began with the basics of Calvinist covenant theology. “The prince of a country is established by God as his subjects’ sovereign in order to defend and protect them against all injury, force, and violence.” He is established “for his subjects’ sake,” and must “govern them by law and reason and to protect and love them as a father does his children.” The Dutch provinces and people have always accepted “their princes and lords under [these] set conditions.”  And they have required them to swear covenants, “contracts and accords” to rule in accordance with “the law and Word of God” and “in conformity with their chartered privileges and ancient customs” and the people’s natural “rights and liberties.” 

But the Spanish have persistently, pervasively, and perversely betrayed these covenantal conditions of rule, the Declaration continued. They have imposed massive unjust taxes, regulations, conscriptions, quarterings, extraordinary tribunals, standing militaries, and religious persecutions. Glossing the Declaration in part, William of Orange lamented “the innumerable cruelties, unjust decisions, brutalities, and other outrages perpetuated contrary” to “all the freedoms, oaths, contracts and privileges of the country.” We have demanded that the chartered “privileges, rights, and freedoms that have been handed down to us” be restored – but to no avail. So now, “we must protect ourselves and avoid being … made slaves of a master who tyrannizes over our bodies, possessions, and consciences.” We must all rise to “necessary, reasonable, Christian, permitted, and inevitable defense” of the province’s and people’s “divine and natural rights.” 

A torrent of new pamphlets and sermons defended the Dutch Revolt, many of them also using familiar Calvinist resistance logic, and several of them translated into English texts that found their way with the American colonists to the new world. A 1581 Dutch pamphleteer recited familiar Calvinist theories of natural rights and political covenants: “God has created men free and wants them to be governed justly and righteously and not willfully and tyrannically.” The pamphleteer further argued: “[T]he people of a country charge and entrust the king or lord with his power, on such conditions as are usual according to the constitution of the country … to administer right and justice and to be submissive to God’s law and the rights of the country. If he becomes instead of a father a murderer, instead of a shepherd a butcher, instead of a prince a tyrant, the provinces are no longer bound to obey him.” 

Another pamphleteer defended the Dutch revolutionaries’ proper use of orderly constitutional procedures of resistance to tyranny, sounding in prototypical arguments of judicial review. No king rules alone, the pamphlet argued echoing earlier Calvinist resistance tracts, but always with lesser magistrates and judges who must check and balance, control and contain him. “He may not violate, importune, or molest any one, nor take his life, [liberty], or possessions on his own authority,” but only in accordance with “the sacred law,” its constitutional enactment, and “the judgments” of these lower officials. If these lower officials discover chronic rights abuses, on their own or through the people’s petitions, and judge them to be in violation of “the privileges and rights” of the provinces and their people,” they “must prevent this with all diligence.” These lower officials must “stand up against” the abusive king or lord — first by exhausting all legal means of restraint at their disposal, but then if needed using organized force and orchestrated violence in accordance with “all written and natural laws.” “[L]life is hardly worth living” if we allow a tyrant to “take from us our constitutional and natural rights and freedoms.” 

A third Dutch pamphleteer in 1584, focused on the need to protect the free exercise of religion, rather than just the liberty of conscience, as some provisional peace measures were discussing. With arguments that still ring strikingly true today, the pamphleteer argued that true religious freedom requires freedom of worship, speech, association, education, and more. A guarantee of liberty of conscience without freedom of religious exercise is a ruse.

I know that they promise freedom of conscience provided there is no public worship and no offence is given, but this is only to trap and ensnare us. For it is well known that conscience, which resides in people’s minds, is always free and cannot be examined by other men and still less be put under their control or command. And in fact, no one has ever been executed or harassed merely on grounds of conscience, but always for having committed some public act or demonstration, either in words, which are said to be an offence, or in acts which are described as exercise of religion. There is no difference between so-called freedom of conscience without public worship, and the old rigour of the edicts and inquisition of Spain…. 

How is it possible to grant freedom of conscience without exercise of religion? For what are the consequences for people who wish to enjoy the benefit of this freedom? If they have no ceremonies at all and do not invoke God to testify to the piety and reverence they bear Him, they are in fact left without any religion and without fear of God…. And I have not even mentioned that one will not of course be allowed to state what one thinks; any one who says any word detrimental to the dignity of the ecclesiastical state or the Roman religion will be accused of acting scandalously or of desecrating human and divine majesty. But this is only the start. The authorities will go further and search books and cabinets and coffers, they will eavesdrop on private conversation, a father will not be allowed to teach his children how to call on God, nor will we be allowed to use our mother-tongue in our prayers. Soon, as I have said before, it will be necessary to restore the edicts and the inquisition in their full severity everywhere. 

Two centuries later, most American founders knew enough about this Dutch political history to see the striking analogies between the Dutch Revolt and the American Revolution; between the 1581 Act of Abjuration and the 1776 Declaration of Independence, between the 1579 Union of Utrecht and the 1781 Articles of Confederation; between William of Orange’s talk of “clear truths” about “rights, liberties, and privileges” grounded in “natural and divine laws” and Thomas Jefferson’s “self-evident truths” about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” founded on “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”

All five members of the committee that crafted the American Declaration of Independence knew about the Dutch founding and declaration. Thomas Jefferson’s Library held several books on Dutch political history including the texts of the Union of Utrecht and the Dutch Declaration of Independence. Jefferson later made clear, however, that “the object of the Declaration of Independence [was] not to find out new principles, or new arguments … but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject …neither  aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing.” John Adams wrote that “the originals of the two republics are so much alike, that the history of one seems but a transcript of that of the other.” Connecticut’s Roger Sherman praised Dutch federalism and its balance of national and provincial sovereignty. New York’s Robert Livingston spoke proudly of his own family’s and home state’s Dutch heritage, and he praised the Act of Abjuration as a model for the American Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin admired the Dutch constitutional enumeration of rights and liberties at both the national and provincial level and wrote of the Netherlands: “In love of liberty, and bravery in defense of it, she has been our great example.”

The American state and federal constitutional convention and ratification debates in the 1770s and 80s adverted to some of the legal and political ideas and institutions developed in the early Dutch Republic — confederacy and federalism, enumerated powers and rights, checks and balances, and more. Some also noted the Dutch pamphleteers’ defenses of popular sovereignty, natural rights, social contract theory, written constitutions, fundamental laws, and others. Several constitutional delegates and ratifiers adduced specifically the Dutch heritage of religious pluralism and religious freedom. Virginia’s James Madison, for example, argued that “the example of Holland proved that a toleration of sects dissenting from the established sect was safe, and even useful.”

But the distinctly Dutch pedigree of these American constitutional ideas and institutions is harder to document. The eighteenth-century American founders were intensely eclectic, and regularly adduced all manner of classical, biblical, and early modern sources in support of their views. While they cited the Dutch example repeatedly, most founders had only limited access to a few poorly translated Dutch political tracts and displayed only a hazy knowledge of the inner workings of the Dutch constitutionalism at work in their day. 

Those American founders who knew more — Adams, Madison, Franklin, Gouvernor Morris, Rufus King, and Alexander Hamilton — expressed concern about the Dutch monarchical institutions, religious establishments, aristocratic hierarchies, and unrepresentative institutions that remained in place in the later eighteenth century Netherlands, despite their promising early constitutional documents. These founders accordingly worked hard in crafting the American constitutions to make specific provisions to stamp out national monarchy, federal religious establishments, titles of nobility and foreign emoluments, and imbalances among the voting power of state and local governments. A few abolitionists also rebuked Dutch (and many others’) profiteering in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Following Article I.9 of the United States Constitution, Congress abolished this odious practice in 1808, as several American states had already done. The Estates General of the Netherlands passed the same prohibition on the slave trade in 1814, now under pressure from both England and the United States.  “Going Dutch” in the American founding meant, in part, engaging eagerly Dutch revolutionary and constitutional ideas and examples, and their religious sources and rationales.  But “going Dutch” also meant that the American founders ultimately paved, and paid, their own way. ♦

---

---

Recommended Citation

Witte Jr., John. “Going Dutch with the American Founders.” Canopy Forum, September 2, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/09/02/going-dutch-with-the-american-founders/

Recent Posts