However significant the story of the big cheese may have been at the time and may be now, it has been overshadowed utterly by another event of that day. This one, too, bears on the relationship between religious minorities and popular majorities.

  In October 1801 Baptists in eastern New York and western Connecticut, the Danbury Baptist Association, wrote President Jefferson “to express our great satisfaction, in your appointment to the chief Magistracy in the United States.”8 After asserting their commitment to freedom of conscience in language similar to that used by Jefferson in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom,9 they went on to lament their own state’s omission to accommodate religious dissent. Connecticut’s colonial charter, they explained, had been retained “as the Basis of our government,” and that meant “religion [was] considered as the first object of Legislation.…” If dissenters from the Establishment had any religious rights at all, they were “favors granted, and not … inalienable rights.” In order to enjoy religious freedom even as favors, they continued, they had first to submit to “such degrading acknowledgements as [were] inconsistent with the rights of freemen.”

  Though they would not have known how irksome Jefferson found the Connecticut Establishment to be, the Danbury Baptists explained to him that it was unsurprising men who wanted “power & gain … under the pretence of government & religion … should reproach their chief Magistrate [Jefferson], as an enemy of religion Law & good order because he [would] not, dare[d] not assume the prerogative of Jehovah and make Laws to govern the Kingdom of Christ”—that is, would not call days of thanksgiving, prayer, and/or fasting. As these men and their organization had recently commenced a petition drive aimed at eliminating religious establishment in the Nutmeg State, they might have found themselves sympathizing with Jefferson as the subject of their oppressors’ criticism even had he not been a prominent proponent of religious liberty. Though he was not “the national Legislator,” the Baptists told Jefferson, and thus could not personally relieve them of Connecticut laws’ unjust burden, they hoped that the president’s good example would so affect America and the world that “Hierarchy and tyranny [would] be destroyed from the Earth”—even from Connecticut. (“Hierarchy” here retained its original meaning of “government by ecclesiastical rulers.”)

  Knowing of the Massachusetts Baptists’ approach, Jefferson drafted an answer to the Danbury Baptists’ kind letter.10 He then sent his draft to his postmaster general and his attorney general, two New Englanders on whom he relied for advice concerning matters related to New England, for commentary.11 Jefferson explained that he took public addresses as opportunities for “sowing useful truths & principles among the people, which might germinate and become rooted among their political tenets.”12 (Jefferson knew the example of his actions while president could affect public opinion too. This helps to account for his having himself inoculated against smallpox in Washington in June 1801 and, since that experiment had failed, repeating it on himself and about two hundred other people at and near Monticello that August.)13 Postmaster General Gideon Granger replied that it would “undoubtedly give great Offence to the established Clergy of New England” and “delight the Dissenters,” but as “[i]t [was] but a declaration of Truths which [were] in fact felt by a great Majority of New England, & publicly acknowledged by near half the People of Connecticut,… his mind approve[d] of it.” As the Baptists and Jefferson hoped, so Granger believed that the principles Jefferson espoused in his draft would “germinate among the People” and help to remedy their errors on the question of the proper relationship between government and religion. Therefore he would not change a thing about it.14 When it was his turn, Attorney General Levi Lincoln counseled Jefferson to remove the passage of his draft explaining on constitutional grounds Jefferson’s policy not to issue executive proclamations for days of prayer and fasting. Lincoln said the people of all five New England states were accustomed to observing such days, including Republicans.15 Jefferson had heeded that advice by the time he issued his response to the Danbury Baptists later that day.16

  Perhaps what will surprise Americans of the early twenty-first century about this story is that it drew little attention in Jefferson’s day. No New England newspaper published it, and even the Danbury Baptist Association’s minutes let it pass without notice.17 In general liberty-minded Americans in the days of the Jeffersonian presidents tended to echo the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—the religious freedom—related document Jefferson mentioned on his gravestone—when the issue came up.

  Jefferson began by noting that he and the Baptists shared a belief that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God.”18 Good lawyer that he was, he could not resist redundantly adding that “he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship,” and next generalized to the idea that “the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions.” Then came his memorable assertion, familiar to us from the Supreme Court’s 1947 decision in the case of Everson v. Board of Education,19 that, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

  Having loosed his metaphor upon the world, Jefferson concluded his letter with statements obviously intended to clarify its meaning. First, characteristically, he located the spread of religious freedom within his understanding of history generally by saying that it was inevitable (“I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights…”) and that it would cost society nothing (“… convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties”). Then, so he would not be misunderstood as saying that American government must be irreligious, he closed by “reciprocat[ing]” the Danbury Baptists’ “kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man” before at last “assur[ing]” them “of [his] high respect & esteem.”

  President Jefferson would in the coming years repeatedly take opportunities to remind the public of his views concerning the proper relationship between government and religion, church and state. Calling the Revolution to mind on one occasion, he claimed that “vassalage in religion and civil government” had been one predicament, the “recollection” of which would “unite the zeal of every heart, and the energy of every hand, to preserve that independence in both which, under the favor of heaven, a disinterested devotion to the public cause first achieved.…” In another instance he told a group of Virginia Baptists that when he thought back through the country’s founding, “no portion of it gives greater satisfaction … than that which presents the efforts of the friends of religious freedom, and the success with which they were crowned. We have solved by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government, and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving everyone to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason, and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.” Jefferson consistently closed such communications with prayers to “the same almighty Being” as his correspondents had invoked—no doubt with the didactic function of his official behavior in mind.20

  How effective these efforts to instruct the public were in Jefferson’s day may come as a bit of a surprise. So, for example, Thomas Jefferson as governor of Virginia had never issued a call for a day of prayer and/or fasting. Despite his presidential predecessors’ example, he would not do so as federal chief executive either. People noticed.

  On April 20, 1802, a correspondent who signed himself “S” wrote from Baltimore to upbraid him.21 Washington and Adams had issued such calls, the unknown citizen noted, and yet, “It is with extreem Reluctance that I must say, that nothing Similar to this has ever occurred Since Your administration, I am at a loss Sir to know what Your objections can be to Such a Step.” After all, “Such a thing is Servicable to Society.” If Jefferson did not issue such a call soon, people might infer that “the eroneous misrepresentations which are in Circulation in regard to your Religious principals, are too well founded.…”

  One lesson of this story is that what are now taken to have been landmark events did not seem so important at the time. While Jefferson’s most famous public pronouncement about government and religion, his letter to the Danbury Baptists, has been central to discussion of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause since the 1940s, it apparently went unremarked, at least by a concerned citizen such as “S,” in Jefferson’s day.22

  10

  As he accepted the Cheshire Baptists’ cheese and corresponded with their bedraggled brethren in and near Danbury, Jefferson also set off on a new departure for the Executive Branch. The Constitution says of the president in Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 that “[h]e shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” During the first two presidents’ administrations, this had been translated into an annual speech to a joint session of Congress, each house of which replied with a formal written statement of its own.

  As secretary of state under George Washington and vice president during John Adams’s administration, Jefferson had felt discomfort over Executive Branch ceremony. Carriages, honor guards, ceremonial swords, stylish suits, and the like struck him as … monarchical. When the time for his first annual message came then, Jefferson was ready. The Seventh Congress opened on December 7, 1801, and on December 8, the president sent his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to deliver his message to the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate. The cover letter explained Jefferson’s new departure by saying that the crude circumstances in which the Federal Government found itself in its rude new capital “render[ed] inconvenient the mode … practiced” to that point, besides which he did not want to impose on them the need to respond regarding matters they had not yet considered.1

  Jefferson and his team had worked on the address for several days. Jefferson began to prepare by writing notes on the Bank of the United States and government revenue.2 When he had served in Washington’s Cabinet, the pattern had been for the secretaries to submit passages to the president for his approval. Jefferson adopted the opposite model of sending his secretaries draft text to critique, telling them that he would welcome both substantive and verbal criticism.3 Turning to the address, he wrote out passages on naturalization,4 on appointments policy,5 on the judiciary and naturalization,6 on annual payments on the federal debt,7 and on the caseload of the federal circuit (that is, intermediate appellate) courts,8 which appeared in the final address either in part or not at all.

  The fair copy draft of the message included marginal headings: “Peace”; “Indians”; “Tripoli”; “Algiers. Tunis”; “Census”; “Finances”; “Economies”; “Appropriations”; “Army”; “Navy”; “Navy Yards”; “Fortifications”; “Agriculture Manufactures Commerce Navigation”; “Sedition act”; “Judiciary”; “Juries”; and “Naturalisation.” Reading through these headings, a Cabinet member would have known more or less what to expect: that Jefferson welcomed peace, looked forward to further incorporation of the Indians into trans-Appalachian American society, had news for Congress on the progress of the navy’s work in the Mediterranean, intended to continue on the path he had already started down of paring back the military, had pardoned Sedition Act convicts, looked to repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801 (with the concomitant budget savings), and favored repeal of the Federalists’ exacting 1798 revisal of the immigration laws (which had extended the period of residence required prior to citizenship from the previous two to a record fourteen years).

  The president received extensive feedback from his Cabinet, heeding some suggestions and deciding not to follow the rest. So, for example, his New Englander attorney general advised him that in light of the impression common “in the northern States, that the Administration & the Southern States, are hostile to our navigation & commerce,” it might be wise to include a suggestion that Congress consider what legislation might be helpful to those important interests.9 Jefferson heeded this suggestion.

  A new day had dawned, Jefferson began: “the wars & troubles, which have for so many years afflicted our sister-nations, have at length come to an end.…”10 While Americans thank “the beneficent being who has been pleased to breathe into them the spirit of conciliation & forgiveness,” he said, they also “are bound, with peculiar gratitude, to be thankful to him that our own peace has been preserved through so perilous a season.…” Peace having come, the former combatants would see that their mistreatment of neutral countries should be considered “as founding just claims of retribution.…”

  Having considered relations with the Europeans, Jefferson next considered America’s relations with the domestic Indians. He held that the Indians were benefiting from the transition from their traditional ways to the settled, agricultural ones he hoped they eventually would adopt.11 In fact the president told Congress that “they are becoming more & more sensible of the superiority of … dependence [on the practice of husbandry and of the household arts] for clothing & subsistence, over the precarious resources of hunting & fishing.…”

  The paper’s next two sections dealt with policy truly foreign. First Jefferson described relations with Tripoli, the sole exception “to this state of general peace with which we have been blessed.” That “least considerable of the Barbary states” had made demands the United States had refused to meet because they were “unfounded either in right or in compact” and had declared war when America failed to heed its ultimatum. Jefferson “sent a small squadron of frigates into the Mediterranean,” he said, carrying a message of peaceful intentions along with orders to defend American merchant shipping.

  What the Enterprise found on arriving at Gibraltar was that “our commerce in the Mediterranean was blockaded.” Under Lieutenant Andrew Sterrett, the ship defeated a Tripolitan corsair commanded by Admiral Rais Mahomet Rous, killing or wounding more than half of the enemy crew (inflicting, in Jefferson’s words, “a heavy slaughter of her men”) in a three-hour battle. Contrary to accepted naval behavior, the Africans twice lowered their flag as a symbol of surrender, then opened fire when the American ship approached. Somewhat astoundingly, the Tripolitans lost sixty men, the Americans none during the battle. Judging that he lacked authority to take the enemy ship as a prize, Sterrett ordered her masts cut down and her cannons thrown into the sea before permitting her to return to Tripoli. Seeing his ship humbled thus, Pasha of Tripoli Yusuf Karamanli ordered the admiral beaten, bedecked with a necklace of sheep entrails, and forced to ride through the town seated backwards on a donkey.12 Jefferson explained the release of the ship and crew by saying that Congress had not authorized the Executive to undertake more extensive military operations, and so defense had been the limit of Sterrett’s action. (Here he covered for the young lieutenant, a Federalist, in a way that would soon draw Federalist ire—as we shall see.)

  In his next section the president noted that relations with the other Barbary states were not satisfactory either. He provided Congress information on which to base its policy in this regard.

  Jefferson held that the decennial census’s results would enable Congress to reallocate representation and taxation among the states. America’s population grew so quickly that it would double within twenty years if trends continued. The prospect, he said, struck Americans not as an augury of future military strength, but as it foreshadowed “the settlement of the extensive country, still remaining vacant within our limits,” and in relation “to the multiplication of men, susceptible of happiness, educated in the love of order, habituated to self-government, & valuing it’s blessings above all price.”

  Another happy topic logically followed. As the population grew, so did importations and the related tariff revenue, which anyway would have been somewhat greater during the post–Peace of Amiens lull in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon because of a temporary cessation of the antagonists’ interference with American merchant shipping. Thus he held that “we may now safely dispense with all the internal taxes, comprehending excises, stamps, auctions, licenses, carriages and refined sugars: to which the postage on newspapers may be added to facilitate the progress of information.…” Even so, he said he expected to be able to pay off the federal debts faster than the Federalist administrations had planned. George Washington had said in his first State of the Union Address that “[t]o be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.”13 Jefferson took the contrary position for two reasons: first, that “sound principles” did not support taxing Americans “for wars to happen we know not when,” and second, that maintaining the old policy could lead to wars “which might not perhaps happen but from the temptations offered by that treasure.”

  Promising to lay an accounting of federal expenditures before Congress, the president noted that he had already “begun the reduction of what was deemed unnecessary. the expenses of diplomatic agency,” he said, “have been considerably diminished. the Inspectors of internal revenue … have been discontinued. several agencies, created by Executive authority, on salaries fixed by that also, have been suppressed, and should suggest the expediency of regulating that power by law.…” Remarkably, in other words, Jefferson wanted Congress to rein in the presidency when it came to creating new Executive positions. In case Congress wanted to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of all federal positions, “they may be assured of every aid & light which Executive information can yield.” He believed there was a “general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies, and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burthen which the citizen can bear,” and so elected officials should “avail [them]selves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge.…” Doubtless remembering what he had seen in France, he did not want it to be “seen here that, after leaving to labour the smallest portion of it’s earnings on which it can subsist, government shall itself consume the whole residue of what it was instituted to guard.” In case he ever lost his way, Treasury Secretary Gallatin would promptly push him back onto the straight and narrow.