Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Joachim Zubly
John Joachim Zubly, minister and political pamphleteer, was born and educated in St. Gall, Switzerland, and, in 1744, ordained at the German Church in London. Shortly thereafter, he immigrated to the British Colonies in North America and arrived in Georgia in 1745. He served in Savannah as assistant to the Reverend Bartholomew Zouberbuhler, a German-Swiss minister, for two years and then moved to Purrysburg, South Carolina, to join his father, David, who had established his own ministry there in 1736. Zubly married Anna Tobler, also a German-Swiss immigrant, in November 1746, and together they had three children, John (who died in 1780), Anne (born in 1756), and David (who died in 1790). Some time after Anna Zubly's death in 1765, Zubly wed Anne Pyne.
In 1760, Zubly returned to Savannah as minister of the Independent Church, a meetinghouse composed chiefly of dissenters from the Church of England. Zubly prospered in Savannah, and he quickly became a prominent land and slave owner as well as a minor officeholder. His ability to preach in German, French, or English helped make him the most influential clergyman in pre-Revolutionary Georgia.
During the crises of the 1760s and 1770s, Zubly's activities helped push Georgia, the youngest and most loyal colony, toward resistance to Parliament. His sermons, which combined religious exegesis with political and constitutional theory, formed a part of the pamphlet literature that articulated an ideology of opposition to Great Britain. Zubly's first political tract, The Stamp-Act Repealed; A Sermon, Preached at the Meeting at Savannah in Georgia, June 25th, 1766 (1766), gave thanks that "affection and confidence is restored between us and our mother country."
Three years later, with a new series of Parliamentary acts threatening the colonies, Zubly anonymously published An Humble Enquiry into the Nature of the Dependency of the American Colonies upon the Parliament of Great-Britain ... (1769). In his analysis of the conflict with Great Britain he invoked the biblical injunction "a house divided against itself cannot stand." Employing standard Whig-opposition language, Zubly argued that Parliament could not levy taxes because they refused to grant the colonists actual, rather than virtual, representation, thus depriving them of the rights of Englishmen. Moreover, Zubly insisted that Parliament's sovereignty over the colonies extended only to matters of trade.
Describing himself only as a "freeman," Zubly also wrote Calm and Respectful Thoughts on the Negative of the Crown ... (1772), in which he expressed his doubts that the Crown had a constitutional right to reject a speaker of the Georgian Commons House who was chosen by the representatives of the people. By 1774, when Princeton University awarded him an honorary D.D., Zubly's reputation had spread beyond the South.
Zubly's best-known pamphlet was The Law of Liberty ... (1775). In this tract the minister argued that "to restore peace and harmony nothing is necessary than to secure to America the known blessing of the British constitution." He made it clear, however, that independence was not the desired goal of the colonists. "Our interests," Zubly reminded the delegates, "lies in a perpetual connection with our mother country."
As a whole, then, Zubly's political writings belonged to the mainstream of essays in the 1760s and 1770s that explored the issues of taxation, representation, and sovereignty. His were neither the most sophisticated nor most controversial statements of an incipient revolutionary ideology. But as a respected and influential spokesman for this position in the lower South, his writings took on added importance.
The Provincial Congress of Georgia elected Zubly a delegate to the Continental Congress, and he served in Philadelphia from 5 September 1775 through sometime in November. In his diary John Adams described Zubly as "a man of warm and zealous spirit; it is said that he possesses considerable property." Zubly, whose constitutional stand made him a radical prior to 1775, rejected the move to independence that many other delegates were beginning to embrace. Although he recognized in The Law of Liberty ... that "in times of public confusion men of all parties are sometimes carried further than they intended at first setting out," he despised the idea of rebellion or revolution. Zubly maintained the opinion that a republican government was "little better than government of devils."
While still a delegate to Congress, Zubly wrote Sir James Wright, the Royal Governor of Georgia, with news of the proceedings in Philadelphia. After one letter was intercepted, Zubly's position was not only further compromised but Congress adopted a resolution prohibiting any member from divulging its deliberations. Zubly departed for Georgia, and in 1777, after he refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the patriot cause, the Revolutionary government in Georgia confiscated his lands and banished him from the state. After the British reestablished royal government in Georgia in 1779, Zubly returned to Savannah from South Carolina's Black Swamp and resumed his ministerial responsibilities. He also once again took up his quill and, under the pseudonym Helvetius, published a series of essays in the Royal Georgia Qazette (July through October 1780). These essays, consummate expressions of Loyalist ideology, denounced the patriots as "desperate and wicked men" engaged in an unjust and unlawful war that mocked human reason, shattered public order, and plunged the country into "blood and flames." Despairing the turn in his fortunes and never comprehending the revolution he had helped wrought, Zubly died in 1781.
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