Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (47 page)

The same universal inclusion is evident when he argues that Christian, Islamic, and pagan forms of established religions are wrong: “The common objection ‘that the ignorant part of the community are not capacitated to judge for themselves,’ supports the Popish hierarchy, and all Protestant, as well as Turkish and Pagan establishments in idea.”
⁷⁶

Leland was not above embarrassing the religious prejudices and provincialism of Connecticut authorities by pointing out that they discouraged foreign immigration. Demonstrating how certificates discouraged this, he even slipped in a cameo role for his hero Jefferson, referring to him simply as “an Episcopalian”:

Such musings led Leland to conclude with praise for the federal Constitution’s First Amendment and Article VI, paragraph 3, respectively, which forbids Congress ever to establish any kind of religion, or require any religious test to qualify any officer in any department of federal government. The beauty of his country’s (as against Connecticut’s) form of government, Leland argued, was its legal guarantee of universal inclusion: “Let a man be Pagan, Turk, Jew or Christian, he is eligible to any post in that government.”
⁷⁸

Even when Connecticut’s new certificate law was repealed after a six-month battle Leland waged alongside other dissenters, he would continue his advocacy for the rights of the state’s Baptists, addressing a gathering of them on the steps of the state’s assembly in 1794. As ever, he spoke in defense of the individual’s right to worship without government interference.
⁷⁹
But not until 1818 would Connecticut officially
disestablish
Congregational Protestantism, the referendum decided by a close vote of 13,918 to 12,361.
⁸⁰
In Leland’s native Massachusetts, once the heartland of the Puritans, his work would take considerably longer.

“What think you of the
Constitution of Massachusetts?” Leland asked rhetorically three years later in his essay “The Yankee Spy.”
⁸¹
His answer: “It is as good a performance as could be expected in a state where religious bigotry and enthusiasm have been so predominant.”
⁸²
Leland objected to several articles of the state’s 1780 Bill of Rights on the grounds that they meddled in religion and discriminated against not just Baptists but also Deists, pagans, Muslims, Jews, and Catholics.
⁸³

Paraphrasing the second article of the Massachusetts constitution, he wrote that “it is the right and duty of all men publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being” (adding, “This article would read much better in a catechism than in a state constitution, and sound more concordant in a pulpit than in a state-house”).
⁸⁴
He explained that the statute would coerce a pagan, who, “upon hearing that it is their
duty
to worship
one
Supreme Being only, must consequently renounce all other deities whom they have been taught to adore.” He concluded that “here their consciences must be dispensed with, or the constitution broken.” Leland made a similar case for the hardship inflicted upon a Deist, “who believes all religion to be a cheat,” to either “act the hypocrite, or disregard the supreme law of the State.” As a man of faith, he “heartily believed” that “it is the duty of men, and women too, to worship God publicly,” but he no less heartily objected to the government’s imposition of that duty, a stance he insisted was consistent with Christian precedent “until an instance can be given in the New Testament, that Jesus, or his apostles, gave orders therefore to the rulers of this world.” And he supplemented biblical wisdom with that of Jefferson, paraphrasing his famous formulation once again: “If a man worships one God, three Gods, twenty Gods, or no God—if he pays adoration one day in a week, seven days, or no day—wherein does he injure the life, liberty or property of another?”
⁸⁵

Leland found the third article of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights no less an affront. It endowed the legislature “with power to authorize and require” taxes to maintain “Protestant preachers.”
⁸⁶
More than
a decade before, Madison’s
Memorial and Remonstrance
had successfully challenged the practice in Virginia of the state supporting Anglicanism. But supporting only Protestant clerics generally was still problematic state interference in religion for Leland. The evangelical Baptist took up the cause of all non-Protestant clergy:

His familiar themes abounded: the pernicious preferment of one faith over another, with the familiar consequences—“Has not the world had enough proofs of the impolicy and cruelty of favoring a Jew more than a Pagan, Turk, or Christian; or a Christian more than either of them?” And finally, he added the wisdom of judging individuals not by spiritual beliefs but by civic virtues: “Why should a man be proscribed, or any wife disgraced, for being a Jew, a Turk, a Pagan, or a Christian of any denomination, when his talents and veracity as a civilian, entitles him to the confidence of the public.”
⁸⁸

Another section of the third article was more inclusive, defining “every denomination of Christians” as “under the protection of the law.” But this too provoked Leland, who demanded it be amended to read “
all men
instead of
every denomination of Christians
.”
⁸⁹
Nor could he help objecting that only self-professed Christians could be elected to office in his native state. His own revisionary constitutional language read this way:

So determined, in fact, was Leland to change his state’s constitution that he would eventually decide to run for office. But long before doing so, he would pay a visit to Thomas Jefferson, the man whose ideas had influenced him so profoundly.

John Leland and the Baptists of
Cheshire, Massachusetts, demonstrated their devotion to the new president with an unusual gift. On New Year’s Day 1802, Leland delivered to the White House what came to be popularly known as the “Mammoth Cheese.” The 1,235-pound cheese had traveled there “by sled, boat, and wagon,”
⁹¹
creating “a sensation” much reported in the press.
⁹²
The people of Cheshire even penned a lengthy poem, including a benediction encompassing themselves, their handiwork, and its esteemed recipient:

God bless this Cheese—and kindly bless the makers
,
The givers—generous—good and sweet and fair
,
And the receiver—great beyond compare
⁹³

The letter Leland presented to Jefferson, signed by the “Committee of Cheshire,” and dated December 30, 1801, also extolled the virtuous labor of “the freeborn farmers, with the voluntary and cheerful aid of their wives and daughters, without the assistance of a single slave.”
⁹⁴
(Cheesemaking was normally women’s work in eighteenth-century America.)
⁹⁵
Just as praiseworthy were the “beautiful features” of the national Constitution, among these “The prohibition of religious tests, to prevent all hierarchy.” If Leland did not write these words, he surely assented to them and to the letter’s description of Jefferson as God’s preferred candidate: “But we believe the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, who raises up men to achieve great events, has raised up a
Jefferson
at this critical day, to defend
Republicanism
, and to baffle the arts of
Aristocracy
.”
⁹⁶

By then Leland had already delivered to Jefferson another, more precious gift: the votes of all but one man in Cheshire.
⁹⁷
(A story exists, confirmed by Leland’s granddaughter, that the lone ballot cast for the native son and Federalist John Adams was thrown out because it was
assumed to be a mistake.) Leland’s sermons, published articles, and political activism had a profound effect within his flock and beyond. After the pivotal election in 1800, he galvanized his Baptist followers and, eventually, all of Berkshire County to embrace Jefferson and his party. This political support would endure for decades despite Federalist supremacy and anti-Jefferson sentiment in the rest of Massachusetts.
⁹⁸

In a private letter, on the first of January, the president noted that the cheese “is arrived” and calculated its precise weight and span. Jefferson well understood why the Baptists, as a persecuted minority, had supported him. He concluded astutely that the offering was “an ebullition of republicanism in a state where it has been under heavy oppression.” Optimistically, he added that “there is a speedy prospect of seeing all the New England states come round to their ancient principles; always excepting the real Monarchists & Priests, who never lose sight of the natural alliance between the crown & mitre.”
⁹⁹

On this same visit, Leland also delivered to Jefferson a letter from his coreligionists in
Danbury, Connecticut.
¹⁰⁰
It defined Baptist views on the separation of government from religion, in full conformity with the vision of the denomination’s founders a century before and echoing positions Jefferson had long held, as Leland knew well from his days in Virginia. The Danbury Baptists declared, “Our Sentiments are uniformly on the side of Religious Liberty—That Religion is at all times and places a Matter between God and Individuals—That no man ought to suffer in Name, person or effects on account of his religious Opinions—That the legitimate Power of civil Government extends no further than to punish the man who
works ill to his neighbor
.”
¹⁰¹

Describing the official inequity under which Baptists suffered in Connecticut, they explained that “what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights; and these favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgements, as are inconsistent with the rights of fre[e]men.” They knew full well that “the national government cannot destroy the Laws of each State,” but they hoped for relief by example nonetheless: “our hopes are strong that the sentiments of our beloved President, which have had such genial Effect already, like the radiant beams of the Sun, will shine & prevail through all these states and all the world till Hierarchy and tyranny be destroyed from the Earth.”
¹⁰²

Jefferson’s landmark response included the now famous words defining his sense of the First Amendment as “a wall of separation between
Church & State.”
¹⁰³
(The first draft had it as “a wall of
eternal
separation.”)
¹⁰⁴
Jefferson’s reply provided the opportunity to vindicate his own enduring opposition to government interference in religion, a political creed the Baptists also embraced. It was an occasion meriting a grand restatement of what he had always thought true:

Jefferson did Leland the honor of attending a sermon he preached to both houses of Congress on January 3, 1802. His words in his own hand do not survive, but we know he had chosen the biblical selection “And behold a greater than Solomon is here.”
¹⁰⁶
This obvious paean to Jefferson provoked the ire of the only eyewitness to write about the sermon, Representative
Manasseh Cutler. A Massachusetts Federalist, Cutler was also a Congregational minister, who was offended by what he perceived as Leland’s lack of restraint in the pulpit,
¹⁰⁷
the way the Baptist “bawled with stunning voice, horrid tone, frightful grimaces, and extravagant gestures.”
¹⁰⁸
(Ironically, while still in Virginia, Leland had attempted to admonish his fellow Baptist preachers about the off-putting effects of just such displays, what he called “odd tones, disgusting whoops and awkward gestures”; he counseled them to make “their piety become more rational.”)
¹⁰⁹
But Cutler was even more scathing about the content than the style, the pandering to Jefferson, a presumed enemy of true Protestant religion: