In the summer of 1789, the General Committee—an early and loose organization of Virginia Baptists—met in Richmond. In a spirit of national pride, they endorsed a letter of congratulations to the Republic's first president, a fellow Virginian, George Washington. Although the letter was sent under the signatures of Samuel Harris, the moderator, and Reuben Ford, the clerk, tradition has credited John Leland as the wordsmith. In 1845 when Leland's granddaughter gathered all his literary works into a published volume, she included the letter to Washington. And the craftsmanship sounds Lelandese!
“We wish to take an active part in the universal chorus, by expressing our great satisfaction in your appointment,” explained the author; and after extolling the virtues and triumphs of the Revolutionary general, the Baptists got straight to their primary concern—the assurance of freedom of conscience under the new government.
“When the Constitution first made its appearance in Virginia, we, as a society, had unusual strugglings of mind, fearing that the liberty of conscience (dearer to us than property and life) was not sufficiently secured; perhaps our jealousies were heightened on account of the usage we received in Virginia under the British government; when mobs, bonds, fines and prisons were our frequent repast.”
Virginia Baptists had just emerged from a period of violent persecution. Under the yoke of a state-established religion—the Anglican Church—Baptists did not enjoy full freedom of religious expression. Baptist services often were interrupted by rowdies and civil magistrates. Baptists were despised by many of their neighbors. Baptist clergy were threatened with physical violence and frequently arrested and imprisoned. The persecuted minority did not go unnoticed by their fellow Virginians who became founding fathers of the Republic. Jefferson, Madison and Washington were mindful of the price paid by the religious dissenters. At the very least, they were aware of the Baptists.
The letter writer continued: “It was feared that we might be accessory to some religious oppression, should any one society in the Union preponderate all the rest. If religious liberty is rather insecure in the Constitution, ‘the administration will certainly prevent all oppression, for a Washington will preside.' Should the horrid evils that have been so pestiferous in Asia and Europe, faction, ambition, war, perfidy, fraud, and persecution for conscience sake, ever approach the borders of our happy nation; may the name and administration of our beloved President, like the radiant source of day, scatter all those dark clouds from the American hemisphere.”
Washington penned a reply to the General Committee. After cordialities, he got to the point which appealed to the Baptists. “If I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the constitution … might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical society, certainly I would never have placed my signature to it; and if I could now conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.”
Washington observed that the Baptists “throughout America” had been “uniformly and almost unanimously the firm friends to civil liberty.” He added that everyone was “accountable to God alone for religious opinions” and should be “protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of conscience.”
The exchange of letters probably did not receive wide publicity. There was no instant messaging or religious newspapers or mass media. The exchange was printed in John Rippon's Baptist Annual Register, published in Britain in 1790-93 and sold in a few American cities, including Richmond. Probably John Asplund, the itinerant Baptist statistician who was compiling his own registers, sent a copy of the letters to Rippon. He knew Leland and most of the other Virginia Baptist leaders.
Likely the average Virginia Baptists of the times did not know about the exchange of letters. A few may have heard ministers talk about it at the time. It is doubtful that the dozen or so Virginia newspapers either had access to the exchange or chose to publish them. Robert Baylor Semple's landmark history of Virginia Baptists, published in 1810, told about the General Committee's meeting of 1789 but nothing about the letters. However, when his book was revised by G.W. Beale in 1894, the letters were included. Johns Hopkins Press published Washington's reply in 1900.
A 19th-century Virginia Baptist leader, A.E. Dickinson, editor of the Religious Herald, said that the contents of the two letters “were frequently alluded to in other years in our public meetings.” In 1905 he printed the letters in the Herald and urged his readers “to cut these out and preserve them.” Both of the modern histories of Virginia Baptists—the books by Garnett Ryland (1955) and Reuben Alley (1974)—included the letters.
Much has been said about the minority status of Virginia Baptists in the 18th-century. One historian stated that in 1759 Baptists were “few in numbers, unnoticed.” Prior to independence, they were estimated to be 5,000 in number “with some 35,000 sympathizers” out of a general population of 400,000. Semple credited revivals of 1787-89 as swelling the numbers. Rippon gave estimates of 20,900 in 1790 and Asplund recorded exactly 20,439 in 1791. Benedict's history estimated only 80,000 Baptists in all of North America in 1800, with one-fourth of these, or about 20,000, in Virginia.
The little minority was growing; but even when they became the largest religious body in the Commonwealth, they still defended full religious liberty for everyone. The memories of their days as a persecuted minority were handed down and the respect for the rights of all persons to freedom of conscience remained a value never to be abandoned.
On Washington's birthday it is fitting to remember that the early Baptists, like the Father of the country, were “firm friends to civil liberty.”