Page images
PDF
EPUB

on whom Jefferson's mantle fell in the Virginia Legislature, James Madison, was able to get the bill for religious liberty passed.

This famous bill was drawn by Jefferson in June, 1779, and watched through all its fortunes with jealous care. Jefferson was our minister in Paris when the bill finally passed in 1786. He had it printed in both English and French and circulated as a pamphlet. It was received with great enthusiasm in Europe. And well it might be! For although there were lands in which religious persecution had wholly ceased in western Europe, there was no sovereign state in Christendom in the year 1786 that had formally proclaimed in its laws the absolute religious freedom of every one of its citizens. The honor of making that declaration to the world was Virginia's-and Thomas Jefferson's.1 The second of the three services which Jefferson asked to have engraved on his monument was: AUTHOR OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

The magnificent language of this statute, though

1 Some of the foremost men of Virginia in the struggle for political liberty were opposed to the radical religious programme of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Henry and R. H. Lee both believed with the clergy that religion would be destroyed "without a legal obligation to contribute something to its support." Washington wrote Mason in 1785: "Although no man's sentiments are more opposed to any kind of restraint upon religious principles than mine are, yet I confess I am not among the number of those who are so much alarmed at making men pay toward the support of that which they profess,"

unfortunately it must be somewhat abbreviated, shall stand here without paraphrase or comment:

Well aware that the opinions and beliefs of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain, by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness; . . . that the impious presumption of legislature and ruler, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and thro' all time; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; . . . that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than on our opinions in physics or geometry; . . . that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; . . . that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself. errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them: We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions

...

...

or beliefs; but that all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."

The Jeffersonian principle of religious freedom was introduced into the Constitution of the United States by the First Amendment, chiefly through the efforts of James Madison, and for half a century it furnished the progressive men of every State the inspiration and arguments for religious emancipation, until civil authority and religious conformity were divorced in every part of the Union. We regard religious liberty as a natural right to-day, and look on it as intolerable that any man should presume to have in his keeping the conscience of another. Yet this was not so when Jefferson began his liberating work a century and a half ago. It is often the greatest benefits that we requite with the least gratitude, because they are just the ones which we can least imagine ourselves being without. No invention of science, no creation of art, no reform of politics can compare in importance for the human race with freedom of conscience.

We have seen that Jefferson's avowed object in leaving Congress for a seat in the Virginia Legislature was the reform of the entire law code of his State, "with a single eye to reason and the good of those for whose government it was framed." In November, 1776, a committee of revision was appointed,

[ocr errors]

consisting of Jefferson, Pendleton, Wythe, Mason, and T. L. Lee. They met at Fredericksburg early in January to agree on the principles of revision and to portion out the work among themselves. When they came to the actual work of revision, however, Mason and Lee resigned from the committee because they were not lawyers, and the whole work fell upon the other three. Jefferson's burden was, as usual, the heaviest. To him was assigned the whole field of the common law and statutes of England down to the foundation of the colony of Virginia in 1607. The British statutes from 1607 to the end of the colonial period were assigned to Wythe and the Virginia laws during the same period to Pendleton. After two full years' work in their respective fields, the committee met at Williamsburg in February, 1779, and went over the results together, "day by day, sentence by sentence, scrutinizing and amending" until they had agreed upon the whole. On June 18, 1779, they presented the result to the legislature in one hundred and twenty-six bills, "making a printed folio of ninety-two pages."

[ocr errors]

This elaborate draft of one hundred and twentysix bills was never acted on as a whole, but "some bills," as Jefferson says in his Memoir, "were taken out occasionally . . . and passed. and passed." The interruption of the work of legislative reform was chiefly due to the turn which the Revolutionary War had taken.

The British, defeated in their campaign for the Hudson and driven to extreme measures by the alliance between America and France, had transferred the seat of war to the Southern States. General Prevost seized Savannah in December, 1778, and proceeded to the conquest of South Carolina. Just at the moment that the revisers were presenting their report to the Virginia Legislature, General Lincoln was hastening to save Charleston. The Carolinas and Georgia looked to the rich and populous State of Virginia to help them. Food, horses, ammunition, men, and guns were generously sent by the legislature at Williamsburg. Then came the invasion of Virginia itself, the raids of Leslie and Arnold heralding the campaign of Cornwallis, which brought the active hostilities of the Revolution to an end on the Virginia peninsula of Yorktown. Inter arma silent leges. When peace came, and the recovery from the ravages of war, the unfinished business of legal reform was renewed. Jefferson was no longer in the legislature, but his faithful lieutenant, Madison, by his "unwearied exertions" got most of the important bills through. It happened, as with every extensive plan of reform, that some measures were adopted at once, some were temporarily defeated only to triumph later over conservative opposition, and some were dismissed finally into the realm of the utopian. The successful measures included the abolition of the slave-trade, the laws for the recovery

« PreviousContinue »