Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders
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176. The Qur’an: Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mahomet (Springfield, MA: Henry Brewer for Isaiah Thomas, 1806), John Adams Library, Boston Public Library.
177. “Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes,” November 6, 1813, in Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 9:416.
178. Quoted in Bailey, Diplomatic History, 65.
179. Marshall Smelser, The Congress Founds the Navy, 1787–1798 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), 9, 20 n. 15.
5. COULD A MUSLIM BE PRESIDENT? MUSLIM RIGHTS AND THE RATIFICATION OF THE CONSTITUTION, 1788
1. “Madison to Jefferson,” October 17, 1788, in James Morton Smith, ed., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 1:564.
2. Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 40 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 1:548. Hereafter cited as Papers of Thomas Jefferson.
3. Quoted in Thomas E. Buckley, Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776–1787 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 49.
4. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:546.
5. Virginia Gazette, September 18, 1779.
6. Ibid.; Buckley, Church and State, 50.
7. Quoted in Buckley, Church and State, 51.
8. “Address by a Watchman, No. 1,” Worcester Magazine, February 8, 1788, in Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist, 7 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 4:232.
9. “A Friend to the Rights of the People,” in Complete Anti-Federalist, 4:242.
10. A similar objection to “Christians, Pagans, Mahometans, or Jews” may be found in the Anti-Federalist tract “The Federal Farmer,” January 12, 1788, in Complete Anti-Federalist, 2:295.
11. “Letter of John Sullivan to Jeremy Belknap,” February 26, 1788, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th ser., 9 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1891), 4:394. See also Jere R. Daniell, “Ideology and Hardball: Ratification of the Federal Constitution in New Hampshire,” in New Hampshire: The State That Made Us a Nation: A Celebration of the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, ed. William M. Gardner, Frank C. Mevers, and Richard F. Upton (Portsmouth, NH: Peter E. Randall, 1989), 8.
12. Daniell, “Ideology and Hardball,” 12.
13. Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, as Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia, in 1787, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1888), 2:203–4.
14. “Letter of John Sullivan,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4:394.
15. William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1680–1883, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 2:717–20.
16. This tendency among Protestants to assert their superiority over other denominations of Protestants as well as Catholics, Deists, and Unitarians was first noted in Thomas S. Kidd, “ ‘Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?’ Early American Uses of Islam,” Church History 72, no. 4 (December 2003): 767, 774, 776, 787; Thomas S. Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8–9.
17. This Anti-Federalist rhetoric of fear against non-Protestants, including Muslims, was observed by Gerard V. Bradley, “The No Religious Test Clause and the Constitution of Religious Liberty: ‘A Machine That Has Gone of Itself,’ ” Case Western Reserve Law Review 37 (1986–87): 710. The absence of a religious test “ran well ahead of contemporary Anglo-American practice,” asserts Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005), 166.
18. Quoted in Bradley, “No Religious Test,” 711.
19. Quoted ibid., 702.
20. Quoted in Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 15. This attitude about rhetorical references to Muslims and Jews has also been adopted more recently by Naomi W. Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13, 24, 25–26.
21. The crucial nature of this precedent was first noted by Morton Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 10.
22. Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, 7 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), 5:2636; Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 25.
23. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 5:2637; Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, 13.
24. Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, 11.
25. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 5:3082.
26. Ibid., 5:3085.
27. Quoted in Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 24.
28. Quoted in Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, 11.
29. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 1:566.
30. Ibid., 5:2597.
31. Ibid., 3:1890.
32. Quoted in Borden, Jew, Turks, and Infidels, 12.
33. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 4:2454, 2460–62; Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, 13 (quote).
34. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 5:537, 544–45; Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, 13.
35. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 6:3222–23; Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, 13.
36. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 3:1700; Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, 13.
37. Thomas Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 46; Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 26.
38. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 5:3256.
39. Ibid., 2:779.
40. Ibid., 5:2793.
41. Griffith J. McRee, ed., Life and Correspondence of James Iredell: One of the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, 2 vols. (New York: Peter Smith, 1949), 1:339 note.
42. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 5:2793.
43. McRee, Life and Correspondence, 1:339.
44. John Locke’s contribution to the Carolinas’ statutes for religious freedom of the seventeenth century acknowledged “that Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the purity of Christian religion” might practice their beliefs in the colony. Locke advocated the toleration of Jews and other non-Christian, indigenous peoples, with an eye to their eventual conversion “by good usage and persuasion,” in the hope that they could “be won over to embrace and unfeignedly receive the truth”; see Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 5:2783–84. In the meantime, Locke pragmatically planned that “civil peace may be maintained amidst diversity of [religious] opinions.”
45. Members of both parties owned slaves; Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle for Ratification, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1993). James Iredell, Federalist, owned eight slaves (2:982); Samuel Johnston, Federalist, owned ninety-six slaves (2:986); David Caldwell, Anti-Federalist, owned eight slaves (2:971); Henry Abbot, Anti-Federalist, owned six slaves (2:967).
46. Quoted in Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 57–59; quote on 35.
47. Storing, Complete Anti-Federalist, 2:159, written in Philadelphia, 1787; 2:410, written in New York, 1788; 3:119, written in Philadelphia, 1787; 5:227, written in Virginia, 1788.
48. Historical precedents, from ancient to modern, remained European, not Islamic; see Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. J. R. Pole (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), xxi.
49. “Patrick Dollard Fears a Corrupt, Despotic Aristocracy,” May 22, 1788, in D
ebate on the Constitution, 2:593–94; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 57–59.
50. “Thomas Jefferson Replies to Madison,” December 20, 1787, in Debate on the Constitution, 1:211.
51. “Thomas Jefferson Replies to James Madison,” December 20, 1787, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Saul K. Padover (Lunenburg, VT: Stinehour Press, 1967), 314.
52. “Patrick Dollard Fears a Corrupt, Despotic Aristocracy,” May 22, 1788, in Debate on the Constitution, 2:593; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 57–58.
53. “Patrick Dollard Fears a Corrupt, Despotic Aristocracy,” May 22, 1788, in Debate on the Constitution, 2:593–94.
54. “Patrick Henry’s Objections to a National Army and James Madison’s Reply,” June 16, 1788, in Debate on the Constitution, 2:695.
55. Ibid., 2:695–96.
56. Ibid., 2:697–99.
57. “ ‘A Citizen of America’ [Noah Webster],” in Debate on the Constitution, 1:129.
58. Ibid., 1:150–51.
59. Ibid., 1:151.
60. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 35–59; Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–65; Kidd, “Is it Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” 767–89.
61. Elliot, Debates, 4:192, 194, 198 (three times on this page, including reference to “the Grand Turk”), 215; Bradley, “No Religious Test,” 691, 697, 702, 710.
62. Elliot, Debates, 4:197 (Jews referenced twice and Jewish religion once), 198, 199 (Jews mentioned twice), 200.
63. Ibid., 4:192 (Catholic religion), 193 (Catholic countries), 195 (pope), 196 (pope twice and priest once), 198 (pope), 212 (priests), 215 (pope and “Papists”).
64. Ibid., 4:192 (pagans and Deists), 194 (pagans), 198 (pagans, Jews, and alone), 215 (with “Papists”).
65. Ibid., 4:194, 197, 198; for president: 4:198 (twice), 215 (once).
66. Ibid., 4:191.
67. The speeches will be recorded here, with a few minor thematic exceptions, exactly in the order in which they occurred in the eighteenth century. See Willis P. Whichard, Justice James Iredell (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2000), 81. The Federalist partisanship of the hired secretary, Thomas Lloyd, probably did not affect the Anti-Federalist but may have enhanced the Federalist speeches; see M. E. Bradford, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 73.
68. John V. Orth, The North Carolina State Constitution: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993) 4.
69. Jerry W. Cotten, “Henry Abbot,” in Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ed. William Steven Powell, 6 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 1:1; Bernard Bailyn, “Biographical Notes: Speakers, Writers, and Letter Recipients,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:981–82.
70. Bailyn, “Biographical Notes” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:967.
71. Cotten, “Henry Abbot,” 1:1–2.
72. Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:967.
73. Cotten, “Henry Abbot,” 1:1.
74. Elliot, Debates, 4:191.
75. Ibid., 4:192. Abbot may have remembered “an agreement between King Charles II of England and Louis XIV of France, the Sun King—that memory, and a network of old fears and resentments coming down from the Reformation,” according to Bradford, Original Intentions, 82.
76. Elliot, Debates, 4:192; Bradford, Original Intentions, 82.
77. Elliot, Debates, 4:192; Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 420.
78. Elliot, Debates, 4:192.
79. Bradley, “No Religious Test,” 698.
80. Louise Irby Trenholme, Ratification of the Federal Constitution in North Carolina (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 120; Whichard, Iredell, 45.
81. Don Higginbotham, “James Iredell, Sr.,” in Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 3:253.
82. Whichard, Iredell, 43–86.
83. Ibid., 56; quoted in McRee, Life and Correspondence, 2:225–39.
84. Higginbotham, “Iredell,” 3:254.
85. Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:982.
86. Higginbotham, “Iredell,” 3:254.
87. Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:982.
88. “Answers to Mason’s ‘Objections’: ‘Marcus’ [James Iredell] I–V,” in Debate on the Constitution, 1:363–98.
89. Whichard, Iredell, 56.
90. McRee, Life and Correspondence, 1:174; Higginbotham, “Iredell,” 3:253.
91. Elliot, Debates, 4:192–93.
92. Ibid., 4:193.
93. Ibid., 4:193–94.
94. Ibid., 4:193.
95. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:548.
96. Elliot, Debates, 4:194; Maier, Ratification, 420.
97. Elliot, Debates, 4:194.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. Bret E. Carroll, Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 90–95.
101. Quoted in Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 1:502.
102. Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 1:503.
103. Elliot, Debates, 4:195.
104. Ibid., 4:195–96.
105. Ibid., 4:196.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid., 4:193.
108. Ibid., 4:212.
109. Ibid., 4:215.
110. Ibid., 4:196.
111. Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, 6.
112. Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 13.
113. Elliot, Debates, 4:196–97.
114. Ibid., 4:196.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid., 4:197–98.
117. This gesture of respect has a precedent in Hindu law under British rule; see Georg Bühler, trans., The Laws of Manu, vol. 25 of The Sacred Books of the East (1886; repr., Delhi: Motilal Benarsidass, 1964), 42–43, 54–55. I am grateful to Xinru Liu for this reference.
118. Elliot, Debates, 4:198.
119. Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:986.
120. Anna Withers Bair, “Samuel Johnston,” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 3:306–7.
121. Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:986.
122. Bair, “Samuel Johnston,” 3:307–8.
123. Elliot, Debates, 4:198.
124. Ibid.
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid., 4:198–99.
127. Ibid., 4:199.
128. Ibid., 4:194.
129. Blackwell F. Robinson, “David Caldwell,” in Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 1:300.
130. Ibid., 1:301; Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:971.
131. Robinson, “David Caldwell,” 1:301.
132. Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:971. The number of acres owned is disputed at 550 by Robinson, “David Caldwell,” 1:301.
133. Elliot, Debates, 4:199.
134. Ibid.; Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
135. Elliot, Debates, 4:200.
136. Ibid., 4:199.
137. Trenholme, Ratification, 108. Unfortunately, less is known about Lancaster than other delegates.
138. Elliot, Debates, 4:215.
139. Ibid.
140. Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, 54–58.
141. Ibid., 25.
142. Whichard, Iredell, 74.
143. Quoted in Trenholme, Ratification, 183.
144. Whichard, Iredell, 74.
145. Trenholme, Ratification, 152–55.
146. James Iredell, “To the People of North Carolina,” August 18, 1788, in The Papers of James Iredell, ed. Donna Kelly and Lang Baradell, 3 vols. (Raleigh, NC: Division of Archives and History, Department of Cultural
Resources, 2003), 3:418.
147. Whichard, Iredell, 81; McRee, Life and Correspondence, 2:235.
148. Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:982.
149. Quoted in Higginbotham, “Iredell,” 3:254.
150. E. Millicent Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1952–53), 2:388.
151. Whichard, Iredell, 90–91; Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:982.
152. Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:982.
153. Bair, “Samuel Johnston,” 3:307.
154. Bailyn, “Biographical Notes,” in Debate on the Constitution, 2:982.
155. The classic biography of Ibrahima is by Terry L. Alford, Prince Among Slaves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), xvi; see also Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 168.
156. The study of specific Muslim slaves in North America includes at least seventy-five men before the Civil War, including both Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman and Omar ibn Said; see Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (New York: Routledge, 1997), 30, 54–83, 128–56. In his earlier volume, he includes primary sources: Allan D. Austin, Africans in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook (New York: Garland, 1984), 121–263, 445–523. Hereafter cited as Sourcebook. There is also a PBS documentary of Ibrahima, based on Terry Alford’s biography, Prince Among Slaves, directed by Andrea Kalin (n.p.: National Black Programming Consortium and Unity Productions, 2008), DVD. For Omar ibn Said, the earliest Arabic autobiography with the translation of Isaac Bird (d. 1876), a Christian missionary to Syria, with the revision of Dr. F. M. Moussa, secretary of the Egyptian legation in Washington, is presented by J. F. Jameson, “Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina, 1831,” American Historical Review 30, no. 4 (1925): 787–95. A reprint of this exact translation may be found in Muhammad A. al-Ahari, Five Classic Muslim Slave Narratives (Chicago: Maghribine Press, 2006), 187–200. A new translation, featuring Arabic-English facing pages of the original manuscript is provided by Ala A. Alryyes, trans., “The Life of Omar Ibn Said, Written by Himself,” in The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, ed. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 58–93 (Arabic-English), 712–14. The newest, stand-alone translation, also with original Arabic text and English translation, may be found in Ala Alryyes, ed. and trans., A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar ibn Said (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 48–79. My references to the Arabic and English are to this edition, cited hereafter as Life. See also Gomez, Black Crescent, 169–72, 176–79, 181–82 (Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman), and 168, 172, 176–79 (Umar [Omar] ibn Said). For a recent, brief overview of Omar, see Jonathan Curiel, “The Life of Omar ibn Said,” Saudi Aramco World 61, no. 2 (March/April 2010): 34–39.