by Simon Schama
As Jefferson warms to his task, the modern reader can feel the indignation and contempt rising in him for all those who needed to support their views, religious or otherwise, with anything other than the pure force of their truth and wisdom. And suddenly, or so it seemed to me in the Virginia State archive, as I held the version that would finally be enacted six years later, but that kept the ringing eloquence—Jefferson was addressing something more than the cramped and timorous prejudices of the day. He was steaming ahead into dark modernity with a coda that was imperishably connected to what America stood for over the long haul of history.
Sentences like Jefferson’s great coda are what should be the text that schoolchildren throughout the American republic ought to recite each day instead of the numb and, since the 1950s, mindlessly reverent Pledge of Allegiance. Then they would understand, right away, the proper meaning of their nation’s existence. “Truth is great,” wrote the man who could be hypocrite, egotist, utopian, beady-eyed stratagem-maker, all in the same week; yet if he had written only the following, he would have still warranted the gratitude of posterity. It is the unflinching answer to moral and immoral bullying (whether by Americans or others), to the sweaty insecurity of the fanatics, to the secret policemen and thug-triumvirs. It is why it is never sensible to give up on America. “Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself…she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
But truth did not prevail, left to itself, at least not immediately. It would take Patrick Henry, pushing his luck by obstinately returning to his scheme for a “general assessment,” for James Madison to realize that the statute might yet have another chance of enactment. Dissenters were now a majority in Virginia, and more than a hundred petitions and addresses, bearing 11,000 signatures against Henry’s proposal, poured into the assembly toward the end of 1785. Many of the most adamant against Henry’s proposal were from backcountry areas like Cumberland County where Baptists were especially strong. Before Madison introduced his eloquent reiteration of Jefferson’s arguments, titled “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” he made sure that Patrick Henry was got out of the way by being elected governor of Virginia. Once that was accomplished, he was free to go on the attack, describing the appropriateness of public alarm at what was “the first experiment [i.e., assault] on our liberties.” It was an ominous precedent, he went on, for “who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity in exclusion of all other religions may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians in exclusion of all other sects.” To deny to others the liberty to profess anything they believed would be an offense against God, not against man. To introduce this kind of preference, Madison argued, would destroy American harmony. “Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world by vain attempts of the secular arm to extinguish religious discord, by proscribing difference in Religious opinion.” The American “theater” proved that if quarrels could not be eradicated, at least, in warranty of equal liberty, they could be defanged, their “malignant influence” drained away.
For Madison and Jefferson, toleration and religious pluralism were America’s greatest blessing, a freedom arising “from the multitude of sects” that, absent government interference, would naturally flourish and multiply. The variety of faiths was not, of course, a hallmark of Madison and Jefferson’s own time, but it would certainly become America’s distinction and was in Madison’s words “the best and only security for religious belief in any society, for where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to persecute and oppress the rest.” For them both, moreover, that “variety” extended beyond Christians. In his autobiography Jefferson made it clear when referring to those who had wanted to insert before the words “author of our holy religion” the qualifier “Jesus Christ,” that they were outvoted precisely because the protection offered by the statute “was meant to comprehend…the Jew, the Gentile, the Christian, the Mahometan, the Hindu and infidels of every denomination.” Remarkably, this pluralism was reaffirmed during the administration of John Adams, when in the treaty made with the bey of Tripoli in November 1796 concluding hostilities, article XI, written by Jefferson’s friend, the poet-diplomat Joel Barlow, declared that “as the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion it has no character of enmity against the laws, religion and tranquillity of Mussulmen.” A pity, then, that apparently the translation into Arabic failed to convey the forthrightness of that profession, which certainly would have come as news to the Maghrebi rulers (and still would, today). But the treaty in its entirety passed muster in Congress with no votes against it, and the religiously inclined President Adams signed it in 1797.
Three years later, however, Adams was happy enough to run for reelection with the help of a smear campaign designed to represent Jefferson as a Jacobinical atheist. “GOD or JEFFERSON AND NO GOD” ran the flyers, and Federalists like John Mitchell Mason said it would be “a crime never to be forgiven for the American people to confer the office of chief magistrate upon an open enemy of religion.” The result would be the enthronement of the “morality of devils, which would break in an instant every link in the chain of human friendship and transform the globe into one equal scene of desolation and horror where fiends would prowl for plunder and blood.” Jefferson won a three-way contest anyway after a protracted count in the electoral college. But what is often overlooked is that the forgotten third man in the election, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, had himself steered one of the most tolerant statutes on religious liberty through the legislature of South Carolina, making that one of the few states where Jews could indeed hold public office, not an academic point given the presence of a lively community and handsome synagogue in Charleston.
In the end, did the Jefferson–Madison view prevail across the United States, concentrated as it was in the First Amendment, the crystal residue in the alembic of so much fiery debate? Not exactly. The “establishment clause” merely bound the federal government, leaving states like Massachusetts to create a government that was aggressively invested in the patrol of religion and public morals. Notwithstanding Madison’s sponsorship of the amendment in late 1789 and his handling of the revisions, Virginia was actually one of the few states not to ratify the First Amendment on the grounds that it offered only “inadequate” protection against the dominance of a single sect. But throughout the nineteenth century, those still excluded from public office—especially Jews and Catholics—could sue under the terms of the First Amendment and often won.
As for President Jefferson, he was happily unrepentant, knowing that the Virginia statute in particular gave encouragement to those elsewhere in the country who would now campaign for their states to follow its example. He was especially happy to receive, on New Year’s Day morning 1802, from the Massachusetts Baptist preacher John Leland, a gift of a 1,200-pound bright red Cheshire cheese, made by the grateful farmers of Cheshire, Massachusetts, from the milk of 900 local cows, every one of them, Leland promised the president, good “Republican cows.” The “Mammoth Cheese” was cut open later that morning, and in the afternoon, the happy Jefferson penned a letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, also engaged in bringing the spirit and letter of the Virginia statute to their state. “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God,” the president wrote that he contemplated the First Amendment with “sovereign reverence,” establishing as it did “a wall of separation between church and state.” In his first draft of the letter (for Jefferson seldom dispatched anything in a single draft) he had written “eternal” before “wall.” But Jefferson knew full well that even, or especially, in the United States nothing was eternal.
18. National Sin
So there was Thomas Jeff
erson, president no longer, comfortably ensconced in his study, patented rotating reading stand on the desk, still working to make America rational. Good luck; it never hurts to try. And he was tenacious in this enterprise, sensing the moment might never come again; that out on the frontier where he imagined sturdy yeoman farmers to be building the nation, men and women were being told by circuit-riding preachers and in thunderous camp revivals to let go of their reason for the Lord, to open themselves to his Light, to shake and shiver when it pierces the quick. But at Monticello there was no quick-piercing, rather the cool labor of the mind, at which there was no more resolute toiler than Jefferson, who devoted himself to the capstone of the project of American enlightenment: the University of Virginia. In that sanctum, he prescribed, there shall be no school of divinity, no Sunday services, no chaplain and no chapel. Instead: a rotunda, with an oculus at the top, as in the Roman pantheon, so that the rays of reason may mantle the undergraduates as they go about their studies. Not everyone in the college was delighted by Jefferson’s instructions. Accusations of a nest of atheism being introduced into a Christian commonwealth had been made, and the great founder was politely asked if it were not possible after all for those who might wish to enjoy the blessings of worship, whether such assemblies might not be permissible if voluntarily funded? Jefferson relented a mite, only to the point of finding it acceptable that students could pray howsoever and wheresoever they wished, provided their solemnities were conducted beyond the boundaries of the university. Then he returned to his provisions for their scientific instruction.
What is wrong with this picture? Its frame is too narrow. It takes in the prospect from Jefferson’s window: the kitchen garden, the botanical pharmacopoeia, the trim fields. But it does not take in those who worked them: slaves, nor the slave quarters, hidden from the house as if entrenched in a Virginian ha-ha. It does not seem to pay much attention to the expressions of faith among the slaves, which were passionate rather than reasonable. For them, Jesus was most certainly the Son of God; the Bible was His Word. They knew exactly what was meant by the sufferings of Christ, endured to save all men and to grant them the hope of salvation, which for them was a matter of body as well as soul. They did not wish to be told that Jesus was but a teacher, not least because in 1819, Mr. Jefferson’s Commonwealth of Virginia, that pillar of separation between church and state, made the instruction of slaves, by black or white, illegal, punishable by imprisonment or twenty lashes or both. They heard from slaves in other plantations that sometimes, white “missionaries” (as they called themselves) would come and preach that if the hands respected the master they might in return expect kind treatment. But the slaves knew their Bible well enough to recite from the Gospel of Matthew, which says, as every Christian knew, do unto others as you would be done by for that it is the law and the prophet, and they didn’t see that much “do as you would be done by” around those parts, not even in Monticello. So when they could they stole away to Jesus, at night, where they heard tell of the Old Israelites taken from bondage by the Lord Almighty, and they sang (way down low lest they be found out) after their own manner “I ’lieve I’m a chile of God, and this ain’t my home, cos heaven’s my aim…”
Much farther away, in a country of white ash and standing corn, at the Oneida Institute in northwest New York, its upright president, Reverend Beriah Green, the author of The Bible Against Slavery and The Chattel Principle: The Abhorrence of Jesus Christ and the Apostles or No Refuge for American Slavery in the New Testament, singled out Jefferson for castigation by simply quoting him, chapter and verse. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Green reminded his readers, Jefferson had described slavery as “the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other…I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever…the Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest—But is it possible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil?”
No, it is not, Beriah Green declared, not if one were a true Christian. And so thought all the seers and prophets of the Second Great Awakening, then burning its way through New England, the Ohio Valley, western Pennsylvania, the Adirondacks and Appalachians down through Kentucky and Tennessee. The awakening was from the torpor of formal church decorum and doctrine; the sense of church as a building with doors that opened and shut at appointed times. The awakeners wanted twenty-four-hour Christians. They wanted men—and especially women, who they felt had not been brought fully within the power of the gospel—to be riven and shriven. And the notion that public matters were off limits to the religious was cowardice, an indolence of the soul. There could be no possibility of moderation on what the most eloquent of them all, Charles Grandison Finney, called “the national sin”: slavery. Merely for church people and its ministers to stay silent on such matters, on the grounds that it was not a spiritual matter, was to betray Christ’s teaching and any possibility of America’s redemption from the damning iniquity. “Let no man say,” wrote Finney in one of his lectures for the Oberlin Evangelist, in the town where he was professor of divinity and had opened the doors of the college to blacks, “that ministers are out of their place in exposing and reproving the sins of the nation. The fact is that ministers and all other men not only have a right but are bound to expose and rebuke the national sins. We are all aboard the same ship. As a nation our very existence depends upon the correct moral conduct of our rulers…shall ministers be told, shall any man be told, that he is meddling with other men’s matters when he reproves and rebukes the abominations of slavery?”
Finney would have had no truck with being told by people like Joel Barlow that the United States was not a Christian nation. Except that he agreed that a country so steeped in blood could not yet qualify, he hoped that his entire life would be devoted to making it so. Finney, an elongated wizard of a man, six feet three, with seemingly elastic arms that he would extend out from his cuffs up to the heavens, or imploringly over the wide-eyed tear-stained faces of reprobates electrified by his lightning bolts of rhetorical ferocity; Finney with the startling periwinkle blue, slightly exophthalmic eyes, with pinprick pupils, swiveled to great effect like an evangelical chameleon; Finney of the chiseled cheekbones, high-domed cranium, and a diapason of a voice that seemed more potent than the most melodious pipe organ; Finney could make women and men from Cincinnati to Memphis faint and tremble with the desire to be disembodied and reborn, right there and then in the dewy Ohio fields.
He was not the first of the great evangelical thunderers. George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards had been artists of sacred despair and joy two generations before. But Finney had something they did not: a touch for democracy. He was the Andrew Jackson of the soul’s ardor. He wanted crowds; he loved crowds; and he gave them the spectacle of terror and the thrill of mercy. Finney had an almost tribal instinct for the excitement of sacrifice: a show of sinners who would be brought to redemption thumbs down, thumbs up, just like at the Colosseum. And in between, props decorated his theater of doom and rescue: an “anxiety bench” where those in trepidation of losing their soul could sweat it out, eyes tight shut while the congregation looked on for telltale tics of redemption. Finney was horribly good at this precisely because he was no Elmer Gantry, no charlatan, but someone who genuinely believed he was a liberator: the emancipator of ordinary men and women who would otherwise be doomed to the “old” Calvinist view of subjection to a preordained fate. There was, he thought, something wretchedly un-American about such passivity. In its place he would supply something more natural to the Yankee: bootstrap salvation. Americans already had the will to make money; he would give them something even more precious: the irresistible urge to stand up and be saved.
A self-educated farm boy from Connecticut, Finney had a notion he would be an attorney. But it did not take him long to realize that such a life would be too narrow a cage for
zeal such as his. A traveling Presbyterian laid hands on him, and he came quickly to his understanding that frontier Americans, accustomed to believe they were makers of their own destiny, would respond warmly to the same prospect of determining, through acts of individual will, the fate of their souls. To effect this, though, could not be the work of a mere morning’s church service. Camp revivals expanded sacred time: the holy assembly lasting days, improvised sermons that could be fleet minutes, or hours on end; great moving walls of hymn and jubilation; outbreaks amid the crowds of joy and trembling as the living spirit broke forth from the dry carnal husk; the errant shaking with glee as they were brought to the fold; and the long arms of Charles Finney gathered them to the shepherd. Ah, he loved to see stumbling sinners draw nigh to the enveloping merciful love of Jesus. It drenched him with sweet gratification.
But once on this road to redemption, there could be no compromise, no shilly-shallying with what Finney called “hindrances to revival” of which the heaviest was the National Sin. That anyone could possibly remain silent on this odium, who could imagine it was but a private matter, was incomprehensible to Finney, who in Lecture XV of his Lectures on Revivals called slavery “pre-eminently the sin of the church.” Finney made it known that he would refuse Communion to any slave owners and demanded that the church “take right ground in regard to politics.” This did not mean, he explained, forming a Christian political party but making sure that only honest men, men who would not be silent in the face of the abomination, would be supported. “Christians have been exceedingly guilty in this matter,” he wrote. “But the time has come when they must act differently or God will curse the nation and withdraw his spirit.”