Introduction (A Religious Tax)
The people who founded Connecticut left England because they believed its church had stopped its reformation halfway, and they crossed the ocean to build a properly ordered Christian commonwealth rather than to escape into private conscience. Their theology was Calvinist and their worship was plain. Their church government was plainer still: no bishops, no courts, no hierarchy of any kind, just a congregation that covenanted together and called its own minister. Town and parish were the same body of people, and the minister was paid by a tax levied on everyone within its bounds and collected by the same officers who collected every other rate. At the time, Connecticut carried forward its 1662 royal charter as its frame of government after independence and did not adopt a constitution until 1818, which meant no bill of rights, no supreme law, and no document against which to test a statute. Religion was a subject of ordinary legislation, and before 1868 the First Amendment did not extend to the states. The Connecticut legislature eventually offered relief, allowing a dissenter to file a certificate declaring that he supported a church of his own and to have his tax redirected there; on paper, that looked like the problem was solved.
Dissenting Baptists Had Concerns
The Danbury Baptist Association was a regional voluntary body of Baptist congregations organized in 1789 or 1790, comprising twenty-six churches in western Connecticut and eastern New York. Its members were dissenters under Connecticut's Congregational Standing Order. However, they did not regard a revocable exemption as a right. Although the law benefited them on its face, they had three arguments against it.
The first concerned the law’s structure and the circumstances. Support of the Congregational church was the default setting for every person in the state. If one did nothing, they funded it. A Baptist had to take an affirmative step to get out, which meant the law treated one denomination as the norm and every other as a departure requiring paperwork. Exemption was not equality.
Second, filing was public. One handed a signed statement to the clerk identifying themself as a dissenter, in a small town where the minister, the justices of the peace, and the men who handed out local offices largely overlapped. The address calls this “degrading acknowledgments.” They were describing having to announce their dissent to the people with power over them to be left alone.
The third is the one they cared about most, and it is the sentence everybody quotes. The exemption was a statute. The legislature that granted it could tighten it, and had. In May 1791 it added a requirement that certificates be approved by two justices of the peace, then reversed course after protest that October. So they had watched, within the previous decade, their liberty get narrowed by ordinary legislation and then restored, which proved it was not liberty at all.
They Went Around Their Legislature (to Jefferson)
The Danbury Baptists were not passive. In October 1800, their association launched a statewide petition campaign to repeal every law propping up the establishment. The trouble was where to send such petitions. The only body that could grant relief was the General Assembly, which was the same institution that had built the arrangement and had tightened the certificate requirement as recently as 1791. With no state constitution, there was no higher law to appeal to and no court that could strike the statutes down. Their members were also, by and large, Jeffersonian Republicans in the most reliably Federalist state in the union, where the Congregational pulpit, Yale, and the political leadership were substantially the same men. So they wrote to Washington. Not for a remedy, which they said plainly the president could not give them, but for a public statement from the most prestigious voice in the country, in the hope that his sentiments would carry into Connecticut what their petitions could not. A portion of the letter reads as follows (spelling modernized):
…what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights: and these favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgments as are inconsistent with the rights of freemen.
Jefferson’s Historical Reply
Jefferson was an odd figure to ask and an obvious one. Odd, because he had no hand in writing the First Amendment. He was in Paris during the Constitutional Convention, and Secretary of State when Congress proposed the Bill of Rights, and the religion clauses were Madison’s work. Obvious, because he had drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the most consequential disestablishment law in America, and had watched it dismantle the Anglican establishment in his own state. To Connecticut Baptists, he was the man who had already beaten a standing order once.
What he sent back was a political act, not a legal opinion, and he meant it that way. He told his attorney general that he used public addresses to sow useful truths and principles among the people. Newspapers reprinted both documents across the country within weeks. The letter’s first move is to adopt the Baptists’ own framing, which is easy to miss: Jefferson begins by agreeing with them that religion lies between a person and God, and the wall arrives as the conclusion of a premise they had supplied in their address. He was ratifying their argument in public, over the heads of the men who ran their state.
That is the significance available at the time, and it is real. The larger significance is retrospective. Because the writer was a founder, because the sentence was compact and quotable, and because it summarized the amendment in a single image, the letter became usable in a way that no other document was. Seventy-seven years later, the Supreme Court in Reynolds, with no precedent to work from, went looking for founding authority and found this. What that Court took from it was not the wall but the clause just before it, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, which is the line almost nobody quotes today and the one that decided the case. Jefferson’s reply reads, in part, as follows (emphasis added):
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, 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. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
What the Letter Did
For the Danbury Baptists, the answer is close to nothing. Connecticut’s establishment survived the letter by sixteen years. The certificate system stayed in place, the General Assembly stayed in the same hands, and the petition campaign the association had launched in 1800 went nowhere. What finally ended the arrangement was not a principle but a party. The Federalists collapsed after the War of 1812, a coalition of dissenters and disaffected Republicans took the state, and Connecticut adopted its first constitution in 1818. Its religion article guaranteed free exercise, forbade preference among denominations, and provided that no one could be compelled to support any church. Asahel Morse, a Baptist minister from Suffield, drafted it. The Baptists got their answer, and they got it the way such things are usually gotten, by winning an election.
The letter’s other career took longer to begin. For most of the nineteenth century it sat in Jefferson’s published correspondence as a minor item, cited by no one who mattered and deciding nothing. It became law in 1879, when a Supreme Court facing its first free exercise case reached for a founder and found this one. It became famous in 1947, when Everson pulled the wall forward into the modern establishment cases. Nearly everything the letter is now asked to do, it has been doing for less than a third of its life.
That gap is worth sitting with. A president wrote to a persecuted minority to tell them, in effect, that he agreed with them and could do nothing for them. The statement failed at its immediate purpose and outlived its occasion so completely that most Americans who can quote the wall have never heard of Danbury, Connecticut, or of the tax that prompted the letter, or of the men who filed a form with a town clerk to announce that they worshipped somewhere else. The sentence they extracted from Jefferson is now read as a rule about what government may not do with religion. The men who prompted it asked a narrower, harder question: whether a liberty that must be applied for is a liberty at all.