by Chris DeRose
Madison saw this debate as fundamental to Virginia’s future, and he brought his usual level of focused, meticulous preparation to it. He was always a well-prepared participant in any debate, researching the history of each issue and exploring all of the possible arguments that might be offered for and against a measure.
The words of the debate were not recorded, but Madison’s notes provide insight. If Virginia could tax citizens in order to support the church, Madison argued, then religious matters could become subject to the courts’ jurisdiction. Should Virginia courts really be deciding disputes among believers? What edition of the Bible should be used: Hebrew, Septuagint, or Vulgate? Which books are canonical and which apocryphal? What is the proper way to understand salvation and forgiveness of sin? Should religious teachers preach salvation by faith or by works?
These were matters of individual conscience, Madison believed, not for courts or lawmakers to decide. Man has a propensity for religion, Madison argued, and state sanction is not necessary for its promotion. Besides, state-established religion was highly susceptible to corruption.31
As Madison fought his own battle on religious freedom in Virginia, he cheered Monroe for defeating a measure that would have allowed state-sanctioned religious denominations in the Western territory. It had been proposed that each township in the West set aside a parcel of land, the proceeds from which would be used to finance the religious activities of a majority of the residents. Madison was firmly opposed:How a regulation, so unjust in itself, so foreign to the authority of Congress, so hurtful to the sale of public land, and smelling so strongly of antiquated bigotry, could have received the countenance of a committee is truly a matter of astonishment.
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?
Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offense against God, not against man.32
The bill would make civil authorities the arbiters of religious truth, “an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of rulers in all ages, and throughout the world . . . an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.”33 Religion, Madison pointed out, has both existed and flourished not only without the support of human laws but in spite of active opposition from them, and not only during the period of miraculous aids to belief, but long after the Christian faith had been left to the ordinary care of Providence. State-sanctioned religion, Madison believed, led non-believers to see faith as an institution that needed secular support because it was too weak to stand on its own. Government, he felt, “will be best supported by protecting every citizen in the enjoyment of his religion with the same equal hand which protects his person and his property.”34
On December 3, 1784, a House of Delegates committee chaired by Patrick Henry had produced a formal bill for the assessment of taxes to support the Episcopal Church in Virginia.35 Madison had succeeded in postponing the final vote on the assessment until November of 1785. He had also proposed a resolution to distribute twenty-four copies of Henry’s bill in each county in Virginia, along with a list of its supporters and opponents and an appeal to the citizens to make their viewpoints known. Madison didn’t yet have the votes to stop the assessment, but he knew that if he could engage public opinion, he could influence the House elections of April 1785. At the same time, Madison voted for a bill he desperately opposed: the establishment of the Episcopal Church in Virginia. Choosing Jefferson as his confessor, he wrote, “A negative of the [establishment] bill would have doubled the eagerness and pretexts for a much greater evil—a general assessment—which, there is good ground to believe, was parried by this partial gratification.”36
In April of 1785, Madison was focused on the elections for the House of Delegates, which would decide the outcome of what Madison wrote Jefferson would be a “warm and precarious” battle over church and state in the next session.37 Before the formalization of political parties, elections turned heavily on personalities. Voters typically knew their candidates well, lived in the community with them, and selected representatives who had the best qualifications and personal characteristics to represent them. But in 1785 Madison and his allies succeeded in running a rare issues-based campaign.
Madison wrote a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessment,” which was published anonymously and distributed widely throughout Virginia. The pamphlet would be among the most famous documents in the history of American religious freedom. As news of the proposed assessment and church establishment spread throughout the Commonwealth, so did the organized opposition. The Baptists and other dissenters bearing the scars of years of state-sanctioned persecution mobilized to defeat candidates who supported establishment.
The dissenters in Culpepper flexed their muscles to unseat a delegate who supported establishment. Culpepper would later be the largest county in Virginia’s 5th District where Madison and Monroe ran for a place in the First Congress under the Constitution. Madison’s success in winning support from the dissenters in 1789 would ultimately secure his victory over Monroe. And it was Madison’s backing of religious freedom in 1785 that made those dissenters his supporters. For the time being, however, Madison was pleased to report to Monroe that many new members of the legislature had won elections by campaigning against the general assessment and establishment of religion, while a number of incumbents had lost their seats for supporting these measures.
In the same letter, Madison also told Monroe about his ideas for promoting commerce. He lamented that the variety of currencies used in the thirteen states created barriers to trade. He was also concerned about a lack of uniform standards for weights and measures. People who wanted to do business across state lines could not be quite certain either what they were paying or what they would get in return. “Do not Congress think of a remedy for these evils?” he asked. Madison suggested that length could be calculated from a pendulum vibrating seconds at the equator, and that weight could be standardized around a cubical piece of gold or something similar.38 While so many members of Congress neglected vital matters of interest to all America for parochial concerns, Madison, even in Virginia, continued to look for federal solutions to the problems in the states.
Monroe replied with the news that Don Diego de Gardoqui, the Spanish ambassador who had been sent to negotiate the matter of the Mississippi, was expected to arrive in New York at any time. Benjamin Franklin was leaving his post as ambassador to France, and it was expected that Jefferson, already in Europe, would be his replacement. Monroe also wrote of his success in moving Congress to recommend that the states of New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania raise soldiers for the protection of settlers on the frontier. Monroe was making great strides on the issue of the development of the West. Unsettled Western lands would be surveyed and sold, measured in townships of one square mile. Negotiations with the Indians were also under way to increase trade and limit the dangers that made the West unattractive to potential settlers. Monroe believed the sale of lands to the west would “soak up all of the debt to the east.” In the meantime, Congress was considering a requisition of $3 million from the states to cover the interest on the debt.39
Madison was pleased to hear about Monroe’s work on Western policy. He wrote back that the Kentucky district of Virginia would soon be petitioning the legislature for a separation. Madison also shared the interesting news of a “state” formed from the “back country of North Carolina that is organized, named, and has deputed representatives to Congress.” This was the short-lived “Republic of Franklin,” in territory that would eventually become part of Tennessee.b
Monroe was fully engaged in the great events of the day, as he had alwa
ys wanted to be. As he walked to the post office to retrieve his mail, he was no doubt recognized and acknowledged with respect as a prominent member of Congress. When he opened and read his mail, however, he did not always meet with such respect in his correspondence.
Throughout the spring of 1785, Monroe’s uncle Joseph Jones was pushing him in a direction Jones thought more practical than public service. “If you have serious thought of pursuing the law as a profession it will be necessary you turn your attention to it,” his uncle wrote. “Without a sufficient stock of law knowledge you would be wrong to attempt to practice.”40
Like any parent (or surrogate parent, in this case) giving advice, Jones was not content to send just one letter. His “encouragement” arrived in a steady drip. Following up after his first letter, Jones wrote in another, “I sometime mentioned to you that if it was your real design to undertake the law, the sooner you did it the better.”
Jones also employed the time-honored tactic of comparing Monroe unfavorably to his friends. Monroe’s old school-fellows Marshall and Mercer, now out of public life, were both distinguishing themselves at the bar. Jones believed that the practice of law required his nephew’s full attention. “As a man engages to do with the woman he marries,” he advised, “cleave only unto her. It is a business that requires both our time and attention, and unless these are bestowed on it, neither profit or reputation will be gained. In short, it is high time you fixed your course in this life.” Public life had its satisfactions, but no public office “can be deemed profitable. They provide for the day, so long as we are able to work. But if a family are to be attended to, or the infirmities of age provided for, a man should extend his views somewhat beyond the present moment and acquiring what is barely necessary.”41
In a third letter, Jones wrote that Richmond, where Monroe had wanted to settle, was saturated with lawyers, but that three or four outlying counties were less stocked with competitors. In Fredericksburg, lots and houses were reasonably priced; Jones suggested Monroe relocate there. He also said that if Marshall or Mercer, who were considering locating in a less competitive county, moved there first, Monroe should drop the idea.42
While Jones remained unconvinced that his nephew was making the right professional choices, Monroe continued to gain respect as a congressman and statesman. During the summer of 1785, that respect was affirmed when a boy carrying a letter from Jefferson in Paris knocked on Monroe’s door. The young man, just about eighteen years old but preternaturally poised, introduced himself as John Quincy Adams. Adams, who had joined his father in Europe on missions in France and the Netherlands and served as a secretary to Francis Dana while the latter was ambassador to Russia, had just returned to the states for the first time in seven years. He was looking to continue his career of public service, and Jefferson had chosen Monroe of all the members of Congress to receive this letter of introduction. Jefferson praised the boy for his “abilities, learning, application, and the best of dispositions.”43 This was Monroe’s first introduction to the man who would eventually serve as his Secretary of State and succeed him in the American presidency.
On June 21, Madison sent Monroe a copy of the Virginia religious establishment bill, and the two men discussed traveling together. True to form, Monroe was impulsive while Madison was extremely cautious. “The part of your letter which has engaged most of my attention is the postscript which invites me to a ramble this fall,” Madison wrote. “I have long had it in contemplation, to seize occasions as they may arise, of traversing the Atlantic states as well as of taking a taste of the western curiosities.” Madison always sounded as though he were the kind of person who would consider every possible objection to an idea. Such obstacles, or excuses, can be found in every situation, but Monroe was as quick to look past them as his friend was to see them.
As Kentucky prepared for statehood, former Virginia legislator Caleb Wallace solicited Madison’s opinions on the new state’s constitution. Madison’s response, written less than two years before the Philadelphia Convention, offers a window into his thinking about the structure of government.
Madison liked the format of the Maryland Senate, in which fifteen members were elected for five-year terms. The other chamber, he felt, should not be too numerous; its membership should be capped. Madison believed that legislative powers should be indefinite, and that it was better to prohibit legislators from certain acts (such as interference with religion, taking away juries, and passing ex post facto laws) than to delineate all of the government’s powers. Madison also supported the idea of a Council of Revision to review bills before they become law in order to maintain the uniformity and consistency of the laws.
Madison’s theory of executive power was incomplete and would more or less remain that way into the Philadelphia Convention. He did know, however, that the Virginia executive, who was dependent upon the legislature for every move, was “the worst part of a bad Constitution.” Judges, he believed, should hold their places during good behavior, with generous salaries not subject to reduction during their tenure. These ideas would eventually make their way into the U.S. Constitution.
Monroe wrote in July from Congress, where Gardoqui had arrived from Spain and presented his credentials from the king and where states were still not sending their requisitions. He was still interested in traveling with Madison, perhaps during the upcoming recess. “What say you to a trip to the Indian treaty to be held on the Ohio, sometime in August or September. I have thoughts of it and should be happy in your company.” 44
Monroe was solidifying his position as a leader of the nationalists in Congress. On July 13, 1785, he made a motion “for vesting the United States with power to regulate commerce between the United States and foreign nations and between the states themselves.” Interestingly, though Monroe would oppose the Constitution of 1787, he pointed to this motion in later years as “the first volume of the laws of the United States, among the preparatory acts leading to a change of the system.”45
On July 18, a committee of Congress reported what funding would be necessary in 1785 and called on a requisition from the states. Monroe would later write, “The ill effect was seriously felt and great apprehensions entertained, if a reliance should be placed on requisitions only, that the sums called for and indispensably necessary would not be furnished, and in consequence the public faith be violated and the government, failing in all its duties, be dishonored and shaken.”46
The two friends would not after all travel together during the 1785 recess. Madison journeyed to Philadelphia and up to New York, just missing Monroe, who by the time of Madison’s arrival had left to observe the treaty negotiations on the Wabash. Throughout his trip, Madison was increasingly pessimistic that the present government would ever have powers sufficient for its responsibilities. He wrote Jefferson, “Congress have kept the vessel from sinking, but it has been by standing constantly at the pump, not by stopping the leaks which have endangered her.... The present plan of Federal government reverses the first principle of all government. It punishes not the evil doers, but those that do well.”47
Madison and Monroe, manning their respective stations in Congress and in state government, had done their best to keep America afloat. But federal government under the Articles of Confederation was a leaky ship that took in water as fast as they could bail it out. It was time for statesmen to turn their attention to mending the flaws in the ship’s fabric.
Chapter Seven
A PRAYER FOR AMERICA
“It has been a year of excessive labor and fatigue and unpro fitably so.”
—JAMES MONROE
The table of the Virginia House of Delegates groaned beneath the weight of the petitions that had flooded in from across the Commonwealth. Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessment” and a number of similar publications had rallied the tide of public opinion against a general assessment to support the Episcopal Church with taxes on the people. That dreaded tax, placed before the legislature
with such fanfare and debated with such a passion in that body and throughout Virginia, was allowed to die a quiet death.
The supporters of religious establishment had put everything into a punch that landed wide of its target. Madison seized the opportunity to deliver a knockout blow. With the general assessment dead and its champions chastened or defeated, Madison reintroduced the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom.
Madison sensed that the time for the bill, initially drafted by Jefferson in 1777 and proposed to the Virginia legislature two years later, had finally come. The act begins, “Whereas almighty God has created the mind free.... Be it enacted by the General Assembly, that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced or restrained, molested, or burdened in his body and goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
The statute ends with an acknowledgment that future legislators could undo the work of the men who had created it, but insists that it is a representation of something more permanent than civil law. “[W]e are free to declare, and do declare, 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.”
Madison wrote Jefferson that his Statute of Religious Freedom had finally become the law of Virginia. “The steps taken throughout the country to defeat the general assessment, had produced all the effect that could have been wished. The table was loaded with petitions and remonstrances from all parts against the interposition of the legislature in matters of religion.”1 Madison proudly noted, “The enacting clauses passed without a single alteration, and I flatter myself have in this country extinguished for ever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.”2