CHAPTER XV

RELIGION AND SLAVERY

THERE was a union of Church and State in Virginia, as there was in other colonies, and as there was in the various countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. From Dahomey to London the law was the

same.

The priest taught the people to obey the king, the king commanded the people to support the priest. Frightful laws against treason safeguarded the power of the king, and were upheld by the priest; laws equally terrible screened the priest from criticism, and were enforced by the king. The people obeyed both, paid both, and were cruelly maltreated by both.

Written in London and sent over to the colony, the Virginia laws against heresy were as savage a set as ever disgraced the books. Had the early Virginians been as much given to pious practises

as the Puritan brethren of New England, there might have been a reign of religious terror South as there was North. Fortunately for humanity, the early Virginian was an easy-going, generous-tempered mortal, who never could have found luxury in whipping bare-shouldered women, pressing old men to death under piles of stone, torturing little children to extort evidence against their parents, and fattening the gallows upon the rottening bodies of witches and Quakers.

The Virginia code, written under the supervision of London ecclesiastics, was bloody enough to have pleased Loyola or Torquemada, but it was treated as all Christian nations now treat the sublime moral code of Christ-all believe and none practise.

Open, defiant rebellion against the Church would have been put down in Virginia; and when Baptists and Quakers came noisily along disturbing everybody in the effort to teach them something and make them think, the conservatives, who already knew all they wanted and who did not wish to think, rose up and asserted the rights of the orthodox.

The fussy, clamorous Baptist having been put into the well-ventilated pen which they called prison, he was left to preach through the cracks to whoever would listen; while the parson, the magistrate, the squire, the vestryman, and the faithful

members of the Church all took a drink, mounted their horses, blowed horns for the dogs, and galloped off on a fox-hunt. In other words, there was orthodoxy established by law in Virginia, but there was no Inquisition to enforce it. Pharisees did not torture their neighbors to death on the pretense of saving souls.

What the Virginians really objected to was the compulsory payment of tithes. The pocket nerve was the seat of the pain. After the coming of such Governors as Fauquier, with their liberal views, skeptical books, irreverent conversation, and non-pious lives, free thought made long jumps in Virginia. Such professors as Dr. Small made a different atmosphere at William and Mary; and from the college halls it spread throughout the State.

The father of James Madison sent him North, hoping to preserve the lad's orthodoxy from the contamination of the home school.

As liberal principles advanced, the number of people who could believe in the creed which Henry VIII had made for himself grew steadily less; yet under the law they had to keep on paying the parson.

The state Church, this Henry VIII Church of England, was neither Catholic nor Protestant, but a mixture of both, without the strong points of either, and to freethinkers it was peculiarly offen

sive. To be compelled to give it glebe and temple, house and home, blind reverence and liberal support, was intolerable.

Thomas Jefferson led the assault.

"Vested interests" made the usual outcry. Its voice is ever the same. The contest was long and stubborn, the inertia of conservatism, prejudice, custom, family pride, fixed habit, and timid conscience hard to overcome; but the line of the reformers continued to advance. It took years to finish the work, but it was finished. The bloody old laws of superstition and bigotry were repealed. Mind and tongue were unfettered. Religious liberty came to all. The Church of England was put on an equal footing with all other denominations. Voluntary offerings of the faithful must support it. Its glebe, its temple, its lands and houses, were confiscated the people had given, the people took away.

It was the fortune of James Madison to finish the work which Mr. Jefferson had begun; but when the task was at last done, it was no more than Mr. Jefferson had proposed at the beginning.

Justly proud of this glorious victory for human progress, he ranked it as equal to the Declaration of Independence, and asked that his monument be inscribed with it.

Working with Edmund Pendleton and George Wythe, Mr. Jefferson went over the entire judicial

system of the colony, remodeling the law and the courts. The labor was enormous. These gentlemen not only reported bills creating a thorough system -high courts and low-but they framed one hundred and twenty-six separate bills embodying changes in the old code.1

All these measures did not go into effect at once. The work extended over a series of years. Much of it was finally done when Mr. Jefferson had gone to other fields; but the scheme of reform was completed along the lines which he had begun, and little if any departure was made from his plan.

The subject of negro slavery was one which had occupied Mr. Jefferson's thoughts for many years. He was an original abolitionist. In the first House of Burgesses to which he was elected, he had caused to be introduced a bill in behalf of the slaves. It met prompt defeat.

In the Declaration of Independence he had written a clause denouncing the inhuman traffic. Congress struck it out. He now prepared a carefully considered, but perhaps impracticable, plan for gradual emancipation. The outlook for the measure was so unfavorable that he did not even have it introduced. His bill to prohibit the further importation of slaves passed without opposition.

'Mr. Curtis says that sheriffs in Virginia, since that reform, have not been required to gouge out eyes and to bite off the noses of criminals. Since that time! The reader of The True Thomas Jefferson derives some queer ideas of old Virginia from Mr. Curtis's remarkable book.