This is a “Fourth of July article.” It is almost a speech. However, I am not going to ask you to celebrate the facts you already know — for example, about our country’s Revolutionary War and the fighting that went on from 1775 to 1781.
Instead, I will present and reflect upon some facts that have been forgotten for 200 years, even by our best historians. These facts were dug out by a mature doctoral student at the University of Virginia who had practiced law for years. He published these facts last year in Wellspring of Liberty. He is John Ragosta.
Rob James
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I have read Ragosta’s book with painstaking care. I believe he proves his point. Here is is: Baptists and Presbyterians of Virginia struck a deal with the leaders of the Virginia government during the war years, beginning in 1776. We can call these Presbyterians and Baptists “dissenters.” When there is an established church, the people who belong to other churches are called dissenters. The Anglican Church was established in Virginia.
In order to explain exactly what this “deal” was, I need to tell the following story.
Before the war, the dissenters were growing in numbers in Virginia. By 1776 there were more Presbyterians, but the Baptists were growing faster. Were they welcome? Government and church leaders, who were mostly the same people, were absolutely determined to deny them anything like equal rights with the Anglican Church. (After the war, it was renamed the Episcopal Church.)
It may be surprising just how fierce Virginia’s laws were in protecting their establishment. People had to pay a hefty tax so that the Anglican clergy could have a salary. Dissenting ministers could not preach without a license, and these were hard-to-impossible to get. Anyone who did not attend the Anglican church once a month could be hit with a stiff fine. Dissenting ministers could not perform weddings. And there were legal restrictions as to when and where preaching could take place.
Most of these laws were enforced, at least against dissenters. Thus a severe persecution was unleashed in 1768. Aimed almost entirely at Baptists, it continued for seven years. During these years, more than half the Baptist preachers in Virginia were jailed for preaching, sometimes for months at a time. Preachers were dunked to mock their baptisms and horsewhipped. When they preached from prison windows, drums were beaten. One preacher was urinated upon through the jail window, and another’s hands were slashed as he gestured through the bars. Hornets nests and live snakes were thrown into Baptist meetings, and horsemen would sometimes ride through their outdoor meetings.
At the time of the “deal” I am talking about (it began in late 1776), the 13 states had been at war for over a year. They had some successes in the first year. These inspired many men to enlist, although usually only for a specified number of months. In late 1776, however, the war news turned grim. The American patriots lost 5,000 troops in an unsuccessful invasion of Canada. General Washington was driven out of the entire area in and around New York City. And many potential soldiers were beginning to say to themselves, “Do I really want to get involved in this?”
This put the leaders of Virginia’s government in a tight spot. The Continental Congress had given them enlistment quotas. They could not fill them. They needed every ounce of support they could get. This included the dissenters. The dissenters were at least 30 percent of the Virginia population, and probably a good bit more. But these were the very people the government leaders had recently treated so badly.
Two examples provide some idea of the people the dissenters were dealing with. When the Virginia colony reorganized as an independent state in 1776, Edmund Pendleton became the first speaker of the House of Delegates (a body in which I was privileged to serve, much more recently); and Archibald Cary became the first speaker of the state Senate. Before the war, each of these men had sat on a county bench that gave the orders to put Baptist preachers in prison. In an ironic turn of events, Cary was put in charge of enlisting soldiers and procuring supplies in central Virginia, an area where dissenters were strong.
How would the dissenters respond? Would they throw their full weight into the war effort, despite the way they had been treated by the people who were now trying to enlist them? At this point our story reaches the “deal.” Given certain conditions, the dissenters said, they would unite with their brethren of other denominations and willingly do all they could for “the cause of liberty.”
The dissenters made their demands as delicately as they could in the petitions they wrote and sent to the House of Delegates. But if they had used the kind of language they probably used in private, they would likely have said something like this (these are my words): “If you government figures will take your foot off our necks, if you will abandon your establishment and give us the equal religious liberty that is ours by right, we will deliver.”
Did the Anglicans who controlled Virginia’s government accept the terms and close the deal? They did; but they did so reluctantly over several years, piece by piece. They were more reasonable when the war news was bad and they needed more soldiers and supplies. By the end of the war, however, meaningful progress had been made toward the goal of equal religious liberty. That goal itself was reached in the famous postwar events of 1784-86. In those events, Patrick Henry’s general assessment bill was left in legislative limbo (it would have taxed people in order to pay the clergy of different Christian denominations), and Jefferson’s Statute for Establishing Freedom of Religion was made law.
Ragosta cautions us not to give too much of the credit to Madison and Jefferson for the breakthrough of religious liberty that took place in Virginia. Long term, the two members of the Anglican gentry have been more influential. But for the victories of 1784-86 that made much of it possible, the dissenters were more important.
For example, the Memorial and Remonstrance that Madison wrote in 1785 did much to sink Patrick Henry’s bill. Madison’s argument is brilliant, and his document is a classic of religious-liberty “scripture.” But note the following contrast. Thirteen copies of Madison’s Memorial were received by the House of Delegates in 1785. A total of 1,552 people signed those 13 copies. But the House also received a Baptist petition called “the Spirit of the Gospel.” In fact, the House received more than twice as many copies of it with three times as many signatures as Madison’s treatise.
Back to our story. How did it end? The dissenters kept their side of the bargain. Ragosta tabulates a great deal of data to show that the counties of Virginia where dissenter churches were strong or dominant supplied at least as many troops and supplies as did the counties where the Anglican Church was still dominant.
But we must ask: is it credible that the deal Ragosta demonstrates was forgotten for 200 years? Yes, it is credible. As soon as the “glorious American Revolution” was won, people began to think of themselves and their respective denominations as pure of heart and patriotic. They were not the type to lay down a bunch of conditions before they would join the fight alongside their countrymen. Ragosta shows how this process began already in 1784 in a statement adopted by the Hanover Presbytery––a group of people who had directly experienced the years of bargaining.
A decade or two later, when the first denominational historians began to write, some of the bargainers were dead, and the rest had adjusted their memories and their oral traditions (or the stories they told their children) in order that they would appear as the kind of people they knew they were.
This leads to a final question. Were our Baptist forebears bargaining schemers who said, in effect, “I will fight if the price is right. What will you give me?” I think that is absolutely the wrong way to describe what they did. They loved their country, yes; and they wanted to resist British tyranny. But they remembered something that none us should ever forget. We owe our ultimate allegiance to God, not to our country.
Thus I believe the dissenters got it right when they said they would fight for their country if their country was to be a place where they could freely preach, freely believe and freely practice the good news of what God is doing for humankind in Jesus Christ.
Happy Fourth of July!
Rob James chairs the Baptist General Association of Virginia’s religious liberty committee and directs the 2010 History Project of the Virginia Baptist Mission Board. He is Cousins Professor of Religion Emeritus at the University of Richmond, where he was an active member of the faculty for 38 years.