Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State

7. “Useful Truths and Principles . . . Germinate and Become Rooted” in the American Mind: Jefferson’s Metaphor Enters Political and Juridical Discourse

“Useful Truths and Principles . . . Germinate and Become Rooted” in the American Mind Jefferson’s Metaphor Enters Political and Juridical Discourse I have generally endeavored to turn [citizen addresses] to some account , by making them the occasion, by way of answer, of sowing useful truths & principles among the people, which might germinate and become rooted among their political tenets. —Thomas Jefferson to Levi Lincoln (1802)1 Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it. —Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo, Berkey v. Third Ave. Ry. Co. (1926)2 Thomas Jefferson’s message to the Danbury Baptist Association was published almost immediately. This must have pleased the president, who hoped that the “useful truths & principles” sown in the letter “might germinate and become rooted among [the people’s] political tenets.”3 The celebrated “wall” metaphor, in the course of time, took root in American political and legal soil and profoundly influenced , if not defined, public debate on the constitutionally prescribed relationship between church and state in the United States. By late January 1802, printed copies of the Danbury Baptists’ address and Jefferson’s reply began appearing in New England Republican 7 95 newspapers.4 The documents were often accompanied by an editorial comment. The (Boston) Independent Chronicle, for example, republished this commentary from the Salem Register: The Danbury Baptist Association has addressed the President of the United States, and have confirmed from his lips, their favorite truth— that “religion is a matter which lies solely between a man and his God.” This christian sect, by attaching itself strongly to the present administration , has gained great success in every part of the Union. The accessions to it are unprecedented in any denomination which has spread itself in America.5 Following its initial publication in early 1802, the letter was not reprinted in a forum accessible to a wide audience for another half century . The missive was not included in the first collection of Jefferson’s papers, published in 1829, not long after the great Virginian’s death.6 Another quarter century passed before it was published in a new collection of Jefferson’s writings. In 1853, Henry A. Washington was commissioned by the U.S. government to compile a comprehensive edition of Jefferson’s works.7 Washington’s nine-volume collection included both Jefferson’s letter to Levi Lincoln and the final response to the Danbury Baptists.8 The Washington edition of the Jefferson papers was reprinted in 1868 and again in 1871. Virtually all twentieth-century anthologies of Jefferson’s works reproduced Washington’s flawed transcription of the Danbury letter. Two major editions of Jefferson’s writings were published around the turn of the century, one edited by Paul Leicester Ford and the other by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh. Only the latter, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association edition of The Writings of Jefferson, included Jefferson’s reply to the Danbury Baptists .9 The missive reached an even larger audience when it was reprinted in several popular one-volume compilations of Jefferson’s writings published in the mid-twentieth century.10 The “Wall” Enters Political and Scholarly Discourse The entrance of the “wall” metaphor into popular and scholarly discourse is difficult to track. Occasional references to the metaphor and to the Danbury letter can be found in nineteenth-century church-state 96 | “Useful Truths and Principles . . . Germinate and Become Rooted” commentaries. For example, the respected nineteenth-century jurist and U.S. attorney general Jeremiah S. Black spoke of a “wall” in an 1856 lecture on religious liberty in the United States: The manifest object of the men who framed the institutions of this country, was to have a State without religion, and a Church without politics—that is to say, they meant that one should never be used as an engine for any purpose of the other, and that no man’s rights in one should be tested by his opinions about the other. As the Church takes no note of men’s political differences, so the State looks with equal eye on all the modes of religious faith. The Church may give her preferment to a Tory, and the State may be served by a heretic. Our fathers seem to have been perfectly sincere in their belief that the members of the Church would be more patriotic, and the citizens of the...