Heritage Column for May 19, 2005
By Fred Anderson
Recently this columnist presented in the same weekend two portrayals of Elder John Leland, the noted 18th-century Virginia Baptist minister and spokesman for religious liberty.
One was for the new First Freedoms Project-the cooperative effort between the Baptist Joint Committee, Associated Baptist Press and Baptists Today-in its meeting at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. The curious tourists all wanted to have their picture taken with the man in Colonial costume. They were told that the man was “a neighbor of Mr. Jefferson” and a Baptist preacher who helped secure religious liberty. The wind whipping off the Tidal Basin almost blew the wig off my head!
The other portrayal was at a country Baptist church in a corner of Orange County not far from the Civil War battlefield of the Wilderness. If you know the geography, Zoar Baptist Church is near Locust Grove and not too far from Rhoadesville. The invitation was extended for Leland to come for the church's 200th anniversary. Few, if any, of the church members realized that Leland really was coming back home and that one of the most outstanding Baptist figures of the 18th century actually had lived in their same neck of the woods.
The late Woodford B. Hackley, one of my predecessors at the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, once wrote an article about a research expedition in which he and the late Stuart Grizzard, once pastor in Orange, made in search for Leland's homestead. With Hackley's research notes and maps in hand, this columnist tried to find the location. My host, John McKay, former pastor of Zoar, was the driver while I read the map as the sun was setting.
McKay also was among the “old boys” who had studied Latin with Dr. Hackley and who were adept at getting the professor off the subject and onto the War Between the States or onto Culpeper County, which was Hackley's home, or onto any topic other than Latin. It was poetic justice that Hackley was still keeping us focused and this time on Leland.
Hackley located the house site along Mountain Road, which is today's Highway 20, and placed it near the present-day Salem United Methodist Church. Leland sold his horse to buy a house and surely we were driving around his 600 acres. Having portrayed the old preacher so many times, I even felt that his presence was all around us.
It was on the Leland farm that the preacher, his wife, Sally, and their eight children tilled the soil. He opposed slavery and worked his children instead. They farmed while the preacher traveled to spread the gospel from Central Virginia to South Carolina. It was while on one of Leland's preaching trips that an evil spirit possessed the house and nearly drove Sally crazy. Whether it was only a swarm of bees or really an evil spirit, the incident was frightening.
Hackley also maintained that James Madison stopped by Leland's modest little home and privately listened to the Baptist preacher's concern that religious liberty had been omitted from the Constitution. Further down Highway 20 the Goshen Baptist Association maintains a roadside park commemorating a public meeting between Leland and Madison at which Leland assured the crowd that Madison would work for an amendment to guarantee religious liberty. It is part of the Baptist contribution toward securing the First Amendment.
Leland left Virginia some 13 years before Zoar was constituted, but he certainly knew their early pastor, Nathaniel Saunders, who was one of the imprisoned ministers from the time of the struggle for religious liberty.
Today's church members wore old-time clothes for the anniversary. They listened attentively to the old preacher's stories of the struggle for religious liberty. They laughed at his humor. It was partly Leland's humor which got him into trouble with his own church in Culpeper and prompted his removal to Orange. Once after healing a breach in his church, he prayed, “Lord, I thank Thee that I and my brethren can hitch our horses to the same rack once again.”
Although the old wooden Zoar Church building has been bricked, cushions added to the benches and electric lights installed, Leland and Saunders and the others of their generation would still recognize the congregation as Baptist. They laugh, sing and cry as Baptists. They like to eat and enjoy their relatively new fellowship hall. They embrace each other and care about each other's joys and burdens. There are even some old names which remain. Leland sold his land to the Rhoades family and there were some members with Rhodes connections.
Today the pastor is Matthew Gilliam, who attends Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. Leland and his generation never had the advantages of seminary education and it is doubtful that, coming back home, the old preacher would be impressed that a new theological school in Virginia actually bears his name. Leland once derided seminaries as “theological mills” which produced preachers factory-style and taught them how to preach a little and drink coffee a lot.
Fred Anderson is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies.