To achieve a separation of civic and religious authority, upon which true religious freedom depended, Jefferson would appropriate not only Locke’s idea about the fallibility of the ruler in spiritual matters, but also another point from Locke’s first letter:
No private Person has any Right, in any manner, to prejudice another Person in his Civil Enjoyments, because he is of another Church or Religion. All Rights and Franchises belong to him as a Man, or as a Denison, are inviolably to be preserved to him. These are not the business of Religion.237
In translating Locke’s notion of rights by natural law, Jefferson’s statute rejects any denial of rights on the basis of religion, and in particular the denial of the privilege of office:
[T]hat our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions … that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.238
It is difficult to reach any conclusion but that Jefferson intended his statute’s application to extend beyond Christian denominations to include all faiths. The letter of the law as written went beyond Locke’s ideal of a tolerant but still dominant Protestant establishment, prefiguring the no-religious-test clause of Article VI, section 3 of the Constitution as well as the First Amendment.
THE FIGHT OVER THE FINAL PASSAGE OF JEFFERSON’S BILL, 1785–86, AND THE INCLUSION OF MUSLIMS AS CITIZENS IN JEFFERSON’S UNIVERSAL INTENT, 1821
That Jefferson’s universalism was meant to include Muslims as well as Jews is attested by a passage in his 1821 autobiography.239 However, the lack of explicit references in his legislation did not prevent it from being blocked in 1779, when it was first proposed. But in 1785, while Jefferson was away in France, James Madison undertook to lobby for the bill, winning Jefferson’s admiration. Jefferson praised Madison for his “unwearied exertions” in directing his most important bill’s passage, a monumental victory achieved on January 16, 1786,240 only after “warm opposition” in the last days of 1785.241 Jefferson describes “the endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers” that the bill suffered along the way. Indeed, while “most of the bills were passed by the legislature, with little alteration,” Jefferson admitted that his original text did undergo changes.242
Jefferson believed that the bill had been “drawn in all the latitude of reason and right,” only to encounter resistance over the breadth of its principled reach: “It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal.” Jefferson laid bare his “universal” intent when describing a last-ditch effort to resist the insertion of the words “Jesus Christ”:
Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.”243
In his 1776 notes on Locke, the basis of his original conception, Jefferson omitted most of the philosopher’s seventeenth-century synonyms for Jesus, including “the Captain of our salvation” and “that Prince of peace,” who “not armed with the sword, or with force … furnished the Gospel, the message of peace.”244 Jefferson did, however, understand the point of Locke’s characterization of a religiously tolerant Jesus, according to his notes of 1776:
[O]ur Saviour chose not to propagate his religion by temporal punmts [punishments] or civil incapacitation, if he had it was in his almighty power. [B]ut he chose to [“enforce” crossed out] extend it by it’s [sic] influence on reason, thereby shewing others how [they] should proceed.245
Nevertheless, in 1777 Jefferson’s legislative language deliberately departed from Locke’s explicit Christian references even while alluding to Jesus’s teaching, in which, by Jefferson’s novel assertion, reason had taken the place of force:
[T]hat all attempts to influence by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone.246
The italicized final clause, which appears in Jefferson’s original draft, was excised in the final version.
The question remained: Did Jefferson intend “the holy author of our religion” to be synonymous with Jesus Christ as Locke clearly had? Most fellow legislators, all Anglican Christians, would certainly have assumed as much. Not surprisingly, some moved to make the reference explicit, but the bill’s author emphatically refused. In his final word on the subject, Jefferson rejoiced in the ultimate rejection of the attempted assertion of those two pivotal words: “Jesus Christ”:
[T]he insertion [of “Jesus Christ”] was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.247
From Jefferson’s “Autobiography”: At the bottom of the page, he advocates for the protection of “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.” (illustration credit 3.4)
Thus one can comfortably infer that since the 1760s and most certainly in 1776, Jefferson’s ideal of national religious and political equality included Muslims, as well as Jews and all others “of every denomination,” who would never have referred to themselves as “infidels.”248 On account of such convictions, by 1821 Jefferson would know firsthand what it felt like to be an “infidel,” but his own use of it indicates none of the venom with which it was attached to him.
Jefferson was not alone in appreciating the impact of omitting the words “Jesus Christ”; Madison agreed that allowing them would have vitiated the universal intent with an implied establishment of Christianity, or as he wrote years after the bill’s passage, the mention of Jesus was designed “to imply a restriction of the liberty defined in the Bill, to those professing his [Jesus Christ’s] religion only.”249
By standing fast, Jefferson ended the establishment of Protestant Christianity in Virginia. In the final lines of his bill’s text he warned future generations against overturning the law, reminding them that “the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.”250 The right to one’s chosen faith was to be understood ever after as a natural endowment, not contingent on even the most beneficent God.
THE FIRST AMERICAN MUSLIMS: RACE, SLAVERY, AND THE LIMITS OF JEFFERSON’S “UNIVERSAL” LEGISLATION
Jefferson believed until the end of his life that his legislation concerning religious freedom had universal scope, protecting all believers, including Muslims. But he was wrong. While his bill would retain enormous importance for future free American Muslim citizens in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, his universal vision never included the first American Muslims, who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were West African slaves transported to North America against their will. Considered by Jefferson to be property rather than citizens, a view his hero Locke had also endorsed, these Muslims of African descent enjoyed no freedoms of any kind.251 They could not practice their faith anywhere, except secretively or at least circumspectly in the proximity of Protestant slaveholders and among an increasing majority of slave converts to Protestant Christianity.252 Nor could they ever claim political equality. Race and slavery placed them beyond rights and, apparently, beyond Jefferson’s vision
, despite the distinct possibility that slaves of Muslim heritage might have lived on his own plantations.
There were certainly more Muslim slaves in eighteenth-century America than Jews, and possibly more than the twenty-five thousand Catholics in the United States at its inception.253 How many Muslim slaves? Their numbers while significant remain difficult to specify exactly. The historian Michael Gomez observed that “53 percent of all those imported to North America” were taken from four areas of West Africa in which “Islam was of varying consequence.” Of the estimated 481,000 West Africans “imported into British North America” as a result of the slave trade, “nearly 255,000 came from areas influenced by Islam.”254 It is therefore reasonable to conclude, as Gomez has, that “Muslims arrived in North America by the thousands, if not tens of thousands.”255 Other historians have proposed an unverified estimate that 15 to 20 percent of all those enslaved in the Americas and the Caribbean were Muslim, but their numbers in Jefferson’s Virginia would be even more difficult to define with any precision.256
The first twenty African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, but by 1756, when Jefferson was thirteen years old, there were 120,156.257 If even 10 percent of those were Muslim, they constituted a scattered but significant minority. By 1774, Jefferson owned 187 slaves, and throughout his life this number would rise and fall with his financial fortunes.258 Although Jefferson attempted and failed to end “this execrable commerce” of the slave trade in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, there is no evidence that he ever met a Muslim on his Virginia plantations.259 In the detailed inventories of slaves he kept in his Farm Book, which also kept account of his horses, mules, oxen, and cattle on his multiple plantations from 1774 until his death, no name of any Islamic resonance is obvious.260
In contrast, at Mount Vernon plantation, where Jefferson’s Virginian neighbor George Washington owned more than three hundred slaves, at least two and possibly four names register a distinct Islamic identity. These include a mother and daughter, named “Fatimer” and “Little Fatimer,” after the Prophet’s daughter.261 Other African slaves named Fatima have been documented in Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia in the eighteenth century.262
Another woman called “Nila,” possibly a variation on the Arabic name Naila, and a man named Sambo, a common but not exclusively Muslim name, also resided on Washington’s plantation.263 Sambo, which means “second son” in the Hausa and Fulbe West African languages, was also the name of a runaway slave of definitively Islamic ancestry whose return was sought in 1775 in a Savannah, Georgia, newspaper.264 As for George Washington’s Sambo, a skilled carpenter, he fled to Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War, but later was returned forcibly to Mount Vernon. The terms of Washington’s will freed Sambo in 1801. As a free man, the former slave volunteered in 1835 to work on his former master’s tomb at Mount Vernon.265 Like Jefferson, Washington supported universal religious freedom for all Americans, but never considered the possible presence of Muslim slaves on his own property.266 Unlike Jefferson, Washington’s will freed all his slaves, while Jefferson, the owner of two hundred souls, manumitted only three during his lifetime and five at his death.267
And neither Founder ever spoke even theoretically to the potential contradiction concerning Muslim slaves.268 But Washington’s case allows us to consider the probability that Jefferson, too, owned slaves of Muslim origin, no matter what their names. But until 1786 his knowledge of Muslims and their faith would remain entirely book-bound.
Given Jefferson’s now certain intimacy with his slave Sally Hemings, and their resulting seven children (only five of whom survived infancy), it even remains possible (though as yet not provable) that the Founder’s children may have had a Muslim great-grandmother of West African origin.269 Recent scholarship by Annette Gordon-Reed, depicting the Hemingses as “an American family” also opens space for speculating about them as a potential American Muslim family.270 If this could be documented, then the tragedy of Jefferson’s most cherished achievement, which in principle included Muslims, would be its failure in practice to embrace his own children—and their mother.271
The founding father of Muslim rights in America, Jefferson had legislated theoretical equality for a population he presumed to be foreign, never recognizing those already present in his country. Although prepared to take an unusual leap on behalf of future free, white Muslims, he could not, as a man of his times, see beyond the race and enslaved status of Americans already present in Virginia, to imagine a day when they might be counted as citizens.
The complications of race and slavery would render Jefferson’s theory of rights, in both the Declaration of Independence and A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, less than universal in application. He could acknowledge this contradiction in the former founding document, but never in the latter Virginia statute, in part because he never realized that there were slaves who were being denied, among other rights, the freedom of religion. The first American Muslims remained invisible to the new country’s most impassioned defender of Muslim rights.
Before he crossed the Atlantic to take up diplomatic duties in Europe, Jefferson had never met a Muslim. This would change when he and his friend John Adams met in London to negotiate a peace treaty with the Muslim ambassador from Tripoli in 1786. The two Founders would try to solve the problem of North African piracy through negotiation, despite diametrically opposed views of effective foreign policy.
4
Jefferson Versus John Adams
The Problem of North African Piracy and Their Negotiations with a Muslim Ambassador in London, 1784–88
Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty. If they refuse, why not go to war with them? Spain, Portugal, Naples and Venice are now at war with them. Every part of the Mediterranean therefore would offer us friendly ports. We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce. Can we begin it on a more honourable occasion or with a weaker foe?
—Thomas Jefferson supports war against
North African pirates, November 1784
The policy of Christendom has made Cowards of all their Sailors before the Standard of Mahomet.
—John Adams to Thomas Jefferson,
July 1786
“THERE IS A Tripolitan Ambassador with whom I have had three conferences,” wrote John Adams from London on February 21, 1786, inviting Thomas Jefferson, then serving as a diplomat in Paris, to help negotiate a treaty with the Muslim envoy from Tripoli, the North African coastal city in what is today Libya. Jefferson would comply the next month.1
In March 1786, three months after the landmark legislation on religious freedom in Virginia was passed in his absence, Jefferson would for the first time encounter a real Muslim, one of only two he ever knowingly met. The month before had been Adams’s first time meeting a Muslim too.
In London, Jefferson and John Adams listened as the ambassador from Tripoli referred to the Qur’an to justify naval attacks against American shipping in the Mediterranean, which the two Americans duly noted in their joint communiqué. It is possible that the Muslim ambassador’s invocation of specific passages in the sacred text caused Jefferson to consult his own copy, perhaps even presenting the occasion when the Founder saw fit to mark the book with his initials. To judge by Jefferson’s single reference to the Qur’an in the context of Adams’s three earlier meetings with the Muslim ambassador, as well as the fourth, at which Jefferson was present, it is clear that religion, however convenient a rationale for “Islamic piracy,” was not the paramount issue in American negotiations with Tripoli. Still, in this earliest face-to-face cultural encounter, it would be Adams, not Jefferson, who emphasized religion in his perceptions of the enemy.
This chapter traces the evolution of Jefferson’s thinking about the piracy problem from 1784 to 1788. His strategy was, from the first, governed not by religious but political and economic considerations. These drove his early, somewhat duplicitous attempt to solve the problem by military means without
informing Adams, who believed that payment for peace was the nation’s better course. As early as 1784, Jefferson preferred a military response to what he considered piratical extortion, but not until 1801, when he was president, would he act on this impulse. Until then, his diplomatic efforts were doomed to failure, since the United States had neither a navy to protect its ships nor even a central government authorized to collect taxes that might be used to pay tribute for peace or the ransom of American captives held in North Africa.2 Piracy, as this chapter documents, was not an exclusively Muslim practice in the Mediterranean, but the taking of captives did provoke difficult questions in America about individual liberty and freedom in the face of what was essentially a faith-based form of slavery.3 Ironically, throughout the effort to end this bondage of their fellow citizens, most Americans, including Jefferson, would never connect it to the contemporaneous American practice of race-based slavery inflicted on captured West Africans.
PIRACY AND RELIGION
The problem of piracy was at the heart of Jefferson’s diplomatic career in Europe, and his effort to fight this mischief perpetrated by the four Islamic powers of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli (collectively known in Europe and America as the Barbary States) has been well documented elsewhere.4 But his refusal to construe this threat to American lives and commerce as primarily a conflict between a Christian United States and an Islamic North Africa has not been sufficiently explored.5 Recent histories of the U.S. encounter with North Africa confirm this point more generally. As the historian Frank Lambert asserts, “Evidence abounds that neither the pirates nor the Americans considered religion central to their conflict.”6 Instead, the motivations on both sides were more mercenary: American merchants were willing to risk their liberty for commercial gain in the Mediterranean, while the pirates of North Africa believed it their right to attack and hold for ransom all those who ventured into waters they controlled.7
Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders Page 16