"A great religious octopus": church and state at Virginia's Constitutional Convention, 1901-1902 (1).

Buckley, Thomas E.

A hundred years ago Virginia drafted a new state constitution designed to disfranchise African American voters. That objective was transparent from the outset of the convention. As John Goode, the presiding officer, assumed his seat, he called black suffrage "a great crime against civilization and Christianity." At the age of seventy-two, Goode was the grand old man of the convention. A graduate of the University of Virginia and life-long Democrat, he had served in the state legislature, the Secession Convention of 1861, the Confederate legislature, and the U.S. House of Representatives before his appointment as Solicitor General of the United States in 1885. Goode reflected the mentality of the vast majority of convention delegates when he stated that African Americans were incapable of education or citizenship. "The omniscient Ruler of the Universe ... made [them] inferior," he proclaimed, and sometime in the future, when the North knew better, the Fifteenth Amendment would be repealed. (2)

But the emphasis rightly placed on the grim tale of disfranchisement has led historians to overlook other aspects of the convention's deliberations. This essay will focus on its debates and decisions in matters of church and state. The place and time lend that subject special significance. During the nineteenth century the Old Dominion had become a stronghold of evangelical Protestant Christianity dominated numerically by Baptists and Methodists. (3) As Goode's maiden speech suggests, references to Christianity, the Bible, and God's design would lace the convention debates. One of the members, Richard McIlwaine, a Presbyterian minister and President of Hampden Sidney College, later praised "the reverence displayed by the members in dealing with sacred things." They acknowledged "the existence of an overruling Providence, who has made himself known in the Bible and in the works of His hands, to whom we owe duty and service." Though he noted that for some, this may have resulted from "good breeding and innate courtesy," he thought that the overall religious atmosphere was "attractive and hopeful." McIlwaine's recollections of the convention's tone reinforce the impressions conveyed by the printed record and the backgrounds of the delegates. At least two-thirds of the delegates belonged to Protestant churches, and all of them operated within the evangelical religious culture--the beliefs, values, symbols, and practices--that formed the substratum of southern society. (4)

At the same time, Virginians maintained that, by virtue of Thomas Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom, they had separated church and state. (5) The General Assembly had approved Jefferson's work in 1786. In sweeping terms it proclaimed that the rights of conscience were superior to any claims of government. The state had no authority in religious affairs except to guarantee that citizens remained free from coercion in matters of belief and practice. Widely publicized, Jefferson's Statute encouraged the movement toward complete religious freedom throughout the new nation and the formulation of the First Amendment. In 1947, when the Everson decision first applied the establishment phrase to the states, the Supreme Court justices relied heavily on Jefferson's work and James Madison's contribution to its passage. (6) Yet they ignored its lived history. Over the years the Statute became incorporated into Virginia's constitution and took on the semblance of sacred writ. Reverence for the text, however, did not produce agreement on interpretation. (7) The sharply divergent opinions at the convention of 1901-1902 anticipated the divisions over church and state in America today.

The convention's debates also demonstrated the close relationship between legal-constitutional development and the social and religious values of a society. The meaning of principles such as religious freedom, religious equality, and church-state separation can only be known within their historical contexts. A study of the Statute in this setting reminds us that Jefferson's text was never fixed. Rather, through press and public debate, the formulation of laws, judicial decisions, and the periodic revision of their state constitution, Virginians drew upon Jefferson's work to construct religious-political, church-state identities for their society, just as Americans do today with the First Amendment. (8)

In writing a new constitution in 1901, the convention delegates appealed to the Statute over three issues: religious equality, the legal status of churches, and public assistance for religiously based institutions. This essay will consider each of these in turn and then examine what the outcomes suggest about Virginia society and church-state arrangements at the beginning of the twentieth century.

I. PRACTICING "CHRISTIAN FORBEARANCE"

When the convention opened in Richmond on June 12, 1901, church-state concerns were already on the minds of certain delegates and their constituents across the state. Indeed the members had hardly adjusted to their seats in the state capital when John Garland Pollard, a Richmond lawyer, offered a brief amendment to the sixteenth article of Virginia's Declaration of Rights. Regarded as the Magna Carta of conscience rights, the article stated in part that, "all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love and charity, toward each other." The Baptist son of a Baptist preacher and graduate of two Baptist schools, Richmond College and Columbian University in Washington, Pollard espoused the principle of absolute religious equality. Most Virginians accepted that principle, at least theoretically. He was tampering, however, with the Old Dominion's Bill of Rights, drafted by George Mason, amended by James Madison, and approved in 1776. It possessed icon status. From that document, Pollard proposed to erase the word "Christian." (9)

His amendment electrified the convention as well as pulpits and press offices across the state. Prematurely gray at twenty-nine, Pollard was the second youngest member of the convention. The aspiring politician had campaigned actively that spring in the election of delegates to represent the city of Richmond. The previous summer he had published in The Times a series of articles comparing Virginia's constitution with those of other states and pointedly noted the existence of religious tests for officeholders that existed outside the Old Dominion. (10) Pollard's Baptist heritage and his close study of fundamental laws had attuned his constitutional antennae to the potential for legal discrimination rooted in religious prejudice. But his outspoken stance roused strong opposition, both lay and clerical, from those who would preserve a Christian heritage and traditional language against an encroaching pluralism.

At issue were the Jews. Pollard defended their cause. In a letter to a Richmond banker, John L. Williams, who had condemned his amendment in the press, the young Democrat argued that a state's "constitution should be purely a secular instrument," without "a single word" even suggesting religious "discrimination." Language that might have been appropriate in 1776 was out of step with the contemporary world. It was unjust, he wrote, "to enjoin upon the Jewish citizen ... Christian forbearance, love and charity." It breathed a "sectarian" spirit. (11) Some Protestant clergymen disagreed. From the pulpit of Richmond's Trinity Methodist Church, George W. Spooner attacked Pollard's resolution as the work of a "demagogue" who was "evidently catering to Jewish patronage and support." The Richmond Dispatch published Spooner's remarks, and Pollard responded by carefully distinguishing between his desire that Virginia be "a Christian State" from any efforts to force the issue by law. In good Baptist form, he argued that "True Christianity does not need nor ask any special recognition at the hand of the law. All it wants is a fair field and no favors." (12) After the press published that exchange, an apologetic Spooner quickly wrote Pollard to explain that only his "emphatic way of speaking" had caused his "harsh language." Pollard quickly grasped the olive branch. "You simply misconstrued my motives," he wrote, "and thought I was attacking the Christian religion, which is dear to us both." In actuality, "the difference between us is not one of aim but of method." (13)

Warmly supporting letters commending Pollard's stance on church-state separation poured into his office, including one from Edward Calisch, the rabbi at Beth Ahaba in Richmond and leader of the city's small but significant Jewish community. The Ohio native and graduate of Hebrew Union College had arrived in the state capital a decade earlier at the age of twenty-six. Under his leadership over the next half century, Beth Ahaba became a bulwark of Reform Judaism. Calisch strove to Americanize his growing flock of first-generation German immigrants while reaching out to promote interfaith understanding and cooperation. (14) He was already on record in support of strict church-state separation. Writing in The Virginia School Journal in 1897, the young rabbi praised the public school system as "the corner-stone of the nation." But at a time when virtually every school in the commonwealth began the day with some combination of prayers, Bible reading, and hymns, he argued against "even the simplest kind of religious exercise." Public education, he insisted, must be "completely and purely secular." (15)

Calisch was on vacation in Atlantic City when the furor over Pollard's resolution broke in the press in mid July. Though regretting his absence "at this interesting juncture," Calisch had read the Dispatch and thought the "intemperateness" of Spooner and Williams hurt their cause. Whatever the convention ultimately decided, in his view Pollard had "gained immensely in the esteem of liberal minded and reputable people." (16) A few days later the rabbi wrote Pollard again. He was obviously tempted to enter the fray himself. "I would have answered Spooner's latest diatribe," Calisch huffed, "except for the fact that he has descended to so low a level that I do not care to follow. I would have to go down too far to reach him." (17)

Spooner, the pastor of the "Mother Church of Richmond Methodism," had evidently pulled out all the stops. While other clergy rallied behind his banner, the convention's committee on the preamble and Bill of Rights met to hear witnesses. Methodist and Episcopalian ministers insisted that the Bill of Rights was a venerable document and "Christian" a harmless, even nonsectarian word. The Jews, moreover, were latecomers. They had entered Virginia knowing the terms of the Bill of Rights and, therefore, had no right to complain. In response, Pollard cogently demolished their arguments, one by one, with the help of M. Ashby Jones, a liberal Baptist minister and outspoken opponent of racial and religious bigotry. They might have persuaded the committee had not Goode arrived at the last minute and warned that removing "Christian" from the text might jeopardize the whole constitution when the state voted on its ratification. (18)

As Calisch observed, politics not principle had carried the day in the committee hearings. Pollard had another opportunity when the committee presented its proposal for the preamble and Bill of Rights on the floor of the convention in September. For his eloquence then, the rabbi later compared Pollard to Patrick Henry. The young politician rose to explain his reasons for offering the amendment during the summer. The fundamental issue was one of "religious equality" for all the commonwealth's citizens. Christians might consider the word "Christian" to be nonsectarian, but it stated a preference that effectively excluded non-Christians. The state should profess no religion and respect the beliefs and consciences of all. In Pollard's view, the whole debate had revealed a significant body of people who regarded Virginia as "legally, a Christian State" in which non-Christians should be tolerated but nothing more. "I do not believe in religious toleration," he proclaimed in words reminiscent of Madison, "I believe in religious liberty--the most sacred form of personal freedom."

What might have been appropriate when Christianity was the only religion in the state no longer belonged in the constitution. The situation now was more pluralistic. Virginia had "a large class of eminently respected, law-abiding and useful citizens who profess another religion." The convention was not a preservation society for "legal relics." The commonwealth's fathers had not written in concrete. "The question should be, not when or by whom this word was placed in the Bill of Rights, but whether to-day it properly belongs there." Opponents had accused Pollard of subverting Christianity. That was, he avowed, the furthest desire of his heart. But in words that echoed Baptist petitions from the Revolutionary era, the politician insisted that genuine Christianity did not need state support. Though a single word in the frame of government might seem a trivial matter to some, for Pollard it represented a fundamental principle: the state had no business judging "the virtues of the religions professed by its citizens."

Having given his reasons for the change, he then concluded by explaining why he would not press his amendment. Goode had warned that across the state people were terribly upset by what they perceived as "an attack upon Christianity." Pollard understood their concern. He would not risk the constitution's defeat. His peroration ended with a stunning bit of irony. For this future governor of Virginia, the disfranchisement of African American voters, "a corrupt and ignorant electorate--the great, over-shadowing evil we were called here to correct"--took precedence over "religious equality before the law, which should exist in every free State and which should be recognized and freely according to every citizen." Like the great bulk of his fellow white Virginians, Pollard did not appreciate that religious equality and racial equality were of a piece, that prejudice was a seamless garment. (19)

Calisch applauded Pollard's address as "the only redeeming feature in a convention that is fast slipping into ridicule." The speeches were too long, the progress was too slow, and the argument over "Christian forbearance" stank of the "bigotry" that he had personally experienced even from clergymen. Allowing themselves to be intimidated by "sensational preachers of hysterical women and unreasoning men," the delegates had sacrificed a fundamental "principle of justice upon the altar of political expediency." The rabbi was disgusted. (20)

II. REVISITING CHURCH INCORPORATION

Pollard was not the only delegate who wished to expunge words from earlier constitutions. In October the convention spent four days debating two other church-state questions. Earlier Alfred Thom, a Norfolk lawyer, had submitted a resolution to the committee on the legislative department: "That it is against public policy to prohibit the incorporation of churches and religious denominations." (21) This issue had a stormy history. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the General Assembly had steadfastly refused to incorporate churches and church-related agencies and institutions on the grounds of church-state separation.

Religious entities felt the pinch. Churches, for example, could not receive bequests. When Joseph Gallego died and left land and money to Richmond's Catholic community to erect a church building, the court judged that portion of his will to be void because no legal entity existed to receive the property. Legal status was also denied to all religious associations. The Episcopal clergy, for instance, had instituted a widows' and orphans' fund, but when they applied for incorporation to safeguard the money, the state turned them down. In 1842, the legislature finally approved a law allowing churches to own a limited amount of property. But a few years later, despite the best efforts of some Baptist and Episcopal ministers, it rejected a general incorporation law for religious groups. William Swan Plumer, Virginia's most distinguished Presbyterian preacher at that time, led the opposition to such a law, and he so persuaded the state's leaders that they enshrined his perspective in the constitution of 1851. It forbade the legislature to incorporate "any church or religious denomination," though it might "secure the title to church property to an extent to be limited by law." After the Civil War, the state court ruled that this provision did not include church agencies such as mission and education boards, but the prohibition on incorporating churches remained. (22)

Thom wanted it eliminated from the new constitution. When the legislative committee heard testimony on his resolution, a number of clergymen, mainly Episcopalians and Methodists, urged reasons for church incorporation. Robert P. Kerr, Pastor of Richmond's First Presbyterian Church, was absent in New York but wrote a strong letter endorsing the change, which he said all of Richmond's Presbyterian clergy supported. "I have known many churches to lose money bequeathed to them for charitable objects by reason of this defect in our Constitution," he wrote. "The present prohibition is a discrimination against churches. It is strange that men associated together for religious purposes should be the only ones not allowed to form a body corporate." (23) It all seemed plausible, and the first two committee votes heartily supported Thom's resolution. But then it became joined to a proposal that the new constitution should include a limitation on the amount of property that churches could own. As noted earlier, this restriction already existed in statutory law, but some wanted specific limits written in constitutional concrete, particularly if churches were allowed to incorporate. R. Walton Moore, a lawyer and Episcopalian from Fairfax County who chaired the committee, favored this approach. (24)

As the hearings continued, the pro-incorporation forces encountered a formidable foe in Wayland Fuller Dunaway, a Baptist preacher. A graduate of the University of Virginia who had served in the Confederate army and practiced law before entering the ministry in 1870, Dunaway had been elected to the convention from two rural counties in the Northern Neck. Thom's proposal alarmed the minister. His vociferous objections that incorporated churches might become wealthy and hence corrupt religion revived fears that had cropped up periodically during the previous century. When Thom rejected the inclusion of a constitutional limit on the amount of property incorporated churches might hold, the committee majority led by Moore and encouraged by Dunaway rescinded its previous support for his incorporation resolution, and it failed its last two votes. (25)

The Norfolk attorney and his committee allies determined to argue their position before the whole convention. That autumn their minority report proposed to replace the statement in the previous constitution that forbade the incorporation of churches with the following substitution: "The General Assembly shall limit by law the extent to which corporations formed for religious purposes shall be permitted to acquire or hold property." The wording represented an attempt to win support from those who feared that incorporated churches might pile up riches. On Friday, October 11, the convention began two full days of debate on the issue. William Robertson, a distinguished lawyer and former judge from Roanoke, spoke persuasively for the minority proposal. The testimony of numerous clergymen had persuaded Robertson that Virginia was out of step with the nation, that "fears" rather than sound "judgment" drove present policy. He traced the previous opposition to church incorporation to bitter denominational feuds and jealousies that no longer existed. Having read Plumer's arguments against church incorporation in 1846, Robertson thought that the rationale for the minister's attack on the Catholic Church's wealth in the centuries before the Reformation was more rhetorical than reasonable. It was also irrelevant. Virginia courts had ruled that church agencies could be incorporated. Why should churches be treated differently? It was time for a change, he argued.

In matter-of-fact language, Robertson explained what that entailed. Churches ought to have the same legal rights that every corporate organization in the modern world possesses: to own property, to make contracts, to transact business, to sue and be sued, and to be held liable. Although church trustees could now hold legal title to a limited amount of church property, their authority ended there. They could make no binding contracts. To buy, sell, or improve church property, the law made them go to court. What the state currently offered to breweries, jockey clubs, and baseball teams, it refused to churches. Robertson thought this patently nonsensical and unjust, the result of fears and deep-seated "prejudice rather than fact and reason." (26)

Dunaway spoke in opposition. The state could limit church property holdings already, but "the milk in the cocoanut" lay in the power of incorporating churches. Wrapped himself in the mantle of Madison, Jefferson, and succeeding generations, he praised the sagacity of their church-state arrangements. Knowing that "wealth is power," the founders strove to keep religion out of politics. The convention should not repudiate their work. As Robertson predicted, Dunaway's case rested on his fears for both church and state. "It is now the glory of the churches of Jesus Christ," the minister proclaimed, "that they are different from other associations." Incorporation would secularize and corrupt them with wealth and worldliness. Eventually they would own "a large part of the real and personal property" of Virginia and emerge as rival powers outside the "State's control."

By framing the church-state issue in terms of wealth and control, Dunaway was arguing along the same lines that nineteenth-century European liberals set up against the Catholic Church. In this contest, either the state or the church must have mastery. It was a far cry from the American system of church-state separation. But a particular historiography, the Enlightenment critique of the medieval church, grounded his argument. With the "Dark Ages," clerical "coffers" spilled over with income and bequests. Church wealth and power brought the decline of "piety" and the growth of "superstitions." People relied on "external baptism," instead of "justification by faith." Finally "the Bishop of Rome put his foot upon the neck of the Emperor of Germany." Unlike Robertson who had spoken at length without interruption, Dunaway faced numerous questions and objections from the floor. But nothing deflected him. The fact that forty-three states now incorporated churches made no difference. Who could tell what evils the future held for them? In his view the present arrangement had served Virginia and the cause of religion well. It should remain in place. (27)

When Dunaway finished, the other clerical member, Presbyterian Richard McIlwaine, spoke briefly in support of his Baptist colleague. In warmly evangelical terms, he pointed out that the church of Jesus Christ needed no "charter" to fulfill its mission. Church "agencies" possessed all the authority they needed to do their work, and incorporation would only hurt the churches. Strict church-state separation, Virginia-style, worked in McIlwaine's view of things. "The State has its sphere. The church has its sphere. The State protects the church in its rights. That is adequately done to-day. We ask no more." McIlwaine sat down to a round of applause, and the convention adjourned for the evening. (28)

The first speaker on Saturday morning was Joseph Stebbins. A Presbyterian businessman and banker from South Boston, close to the North Carolina border, he repeated much of Dunaway's and McIlwaine's arguments. But the essence of his case against church incorporation was that the churches themselves, in terms of their governing officers or bodies, had not requested it. Carter Glass disagreed. A newspaper editor and dairy farmer from Lynchburg, Glass would begin in 1902 a distinguished career in the U.S. House of Representatives and then the Senate. Identifying himself as a Methodist, he informed Stebbins that he knew personally that numerous district conferences of Methodists had asked for the change. The debate then moved into whether or not church officials had asked for the insertion of the prohibition in the constitution of 1850. Stebbins retreated further into the comforts of history, ranging from the corruption of the church with Constantine to its purification in the Reformation, and then detailed his concerns for its future "spiritual" welfare. To bolster his case against ecclesiastical wealth, the banker pulled out a copy of France's recently passed "Associations Law" with a map showing the recent growth in church property that the law was designed to reverse. (29)

After Stebbins finished, an irritated Glass rose from his seat. Though unprepared to give a speech, he felt compelled to object. He found much of the debate irrelevant to the issue. Robertson had succinctly spelt out the rationale for change. Amid all the opposition's verbiage, their single argument was that incorporation would make churches "excessively wealthy and ... worldly." Yet in fact future corporate status would not permit churches to possess any more property than they could own today. The whole business was "a bugbear." In voting on Robertson's resolution, the only real question to consider was whether the churches should conduct their business directly or continue to act by subterfuge through their agencies. (30)

The second day of the debate was wearying the members, but before Alfred Thom could conclude the case for the resolution, a prolonged wrangle erupted over whether Robertson would be willing to amend it and write into the constitution the current statutory limits on church property in Virginia. As tempers rose in the chamber, Joseph Wysor provided comic relief: "Is not a corporation an artificial person without a soul," he queried? When the speaker agreed, Wysor continued: "Is not the church frequently described in the Scriptures as the bride of Christ!" Well then, "what will the bridegroom do when he comes and finds the bride incorporated?" That broke the tension, the delegates laughed and applauded, and Thom rose for his address.

He found himself in an awkward position. The proposal that he championed had not originated with him, or Robertson, or Glass. They had simply responded to the requests of Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian clergy. But the two ministers at the convention opposed it. While McIlwaine as a college president may not adequately represent Presbyterian pastors, Thom was sure that Dunaway reflected Baptist views. Bluntly accusing the preacher of religious prejudice, Thom slashed away at Dunaway's argument: "At the bottom of it, taking out his medieval history, we have nothing left [but] his medieval sentiment. He comes before this Convention declaring that his fears largely control him, and ... before the Committee in debate, that he was not only actuated by his fears, but he was actuated by the inherited prejudices of his church." That charge brought Dunaway to his feet. He had never, he said, "admitted that I was influenced by my prejudices." Had he ever done so, he now retracted that confession.

Thom then reviewed the limitations churches faced in managing their affairs. It made no sense for the convention to hamper their work. The references speakers had made to established churches in England and "Roman Catholic countries" were not pertinent to Virginia. Incorporation would not establish the church. Though it changed the "legal relationship," it would not place "the State in the church business any more than the State goes into the railroad business when it incorporates a railroad company." Incorporation, in short, would not create a "union of Church and State." The delegates had become terrified by "mere visions." Thom reassured them: "There is no danger of a great religious octopus coming and eating us up." The real peril lay in yielding to "medieval" ideas that chained Virginia to "a past that is dead and gone." When the vote was taken, however, the past won and Robertson's resolution failed. The churches remained unincorporated. (31)

III. FUNDING SECTARIAN CHARITIES

When the convention reconvened on Monday, Dunaway switched from opponent to advocate. In June he had sponsored a resolution before the legislative committee: "to prevent the appropriation of public funds to sectarian uses," which he now proceeded to urge. The Baptist preacher wanted the new constitution to forbid the General Assembly or any city, county, or government agency from providing land, money, or "personal property ... to any church or sectarian society, or help to maintain or support any society, association or institution whatever, which is entirely or partly, directly or indirectly, controlled by any church or sectarian society." (32)

Dunaway's concern centered on a fiscal policy in several Virginia cities. A year after the Civil War, at the request of the Sisters of Charity, Richmond's City Council had voted an appropriation of $1,000 for St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum. In 1867 the city began assisting St. Paul's Church-Home for children, operated by the Episcopalians. Over the next decades, city officials voted funds, eliminated property taxes, and provided gas from the city's gas works for a growing number of Catholic and Protestant charitable institutions--orphan asylums, homes for the aged, and hospitals. (33) By 1900 Richmond, the largest city in Virginia, had a population of 85,000, and the city council was partially funding twenty-five private institutions with grants ranging from $100 to $750 at a total cost of $8,674. That comprised twenty-eight percent of the charities budget. Norfolk, half Richmond's size, was assisting both the Protestant Hospital and St. Vincent's Hospital staffed by the Sisters of Charity. Other, smaller cities followed suit. (34)

But public funding of private and church-based charities bothered some Virginians. In a long article published in 1878, the Baptist Religious Herald criticized the grants by Richmond's city council to St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum and St. Paul's Church Home. Anticipating the Supreme Court's doctrine of strict separation, the author insisted: No religious denomination should receive one cent from the public treasury.... Appropriations of property or money to sectarian institutions is at variance with the entire freedom of religious belief and action that is the distinctive characteristic of our governments. To favor any religious denomination or creed is a discrimination forbidden by the spirit of our Constitution and the genius of our institutions. Entire separation of church and state, the right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience, the right to choose one's religion or have no religion at all, if one prefers, have been regarded as fundamental political axioms. To tax a citizen of one faith to support or encourage the tenets and doctrines of a citizen of another faith; to compel me to contribute money, under any pretext, to the support of church or school or Asylum or Home of any denomination, my own or another, is a flagrant wrong. (35)

Virginia's cities ignored the Herald's criticism of their policy. But now the convention offered Baptists an opportunity to press the issue. Charles Fenton James, a Baptist minister, educator, and historian, had recently reminded his confreres of the part Baptists had played in the great contest over church and state during the Revolutionary era. In 1900 the president of Roanoke Female College in Danville published his Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia. A decade earlier, James had crossed pens with William Wirt Henry, a Presbyterian, who had given preeminence to the Presbyterian role in winning religious liberty. Now James sought to correct the record with a definitive history. His book paid lavish attention to the Baptist contribution. (36) Undoubtedly Dunaway was familiar with James's work.

While the Baptist argued his case before the legislative committee in the capitol, the Dover Baptist Association met nearby at the Leigh-Street Baptist Church and formulated a petition. Notifying the convention that they represented 14,742 Virginia Baptists, the ministers complained that cities were appropriating public funds for "sectarian institutions." They asked that the new constitution prohibit this "violation of the principle of entire separation of Church and State." (37) The legislative committee, however, voted against the inclusion of Dunaway's resolution in their report to the convention. For three weeks in August the convention shut down while members escaped from Richmond's summer humidity. Upon their return, they soon faced the heat of public opinion. The minister and his allies had not been idle.

Dunaway's arguments had persuaded five members of the legislative committee to support his viewpoint. When the committee reported to the convention toward the end of August, a minority resolution recommended that the new constitution prohibit any appropriation of public funds or personal property or real estate ... by the General Assembly, or by the authorities of any city, town, county district, or other municipal corporation, to any church or sectarian society, association, or institution of any kind whatever which is entirely or partly, directly or indirectly, controlled by any sectarian society, or make any appropriation for paying for any religious services; nor shall any like appropriation be made to any charitable, industrial, or educational institution which is not owned or controlled by the State, or by such city, town, county district, or other municipal corporation. (38)

As the delegates drifted back into Richmond after summer holidays, they began receiving Baptist petitions from across the state. Over the next month and a half at least fifteen more Baptist associations followed the Dover association to support Dunaway's proposal against public funding of church-based institutions. It was an impressive display of denominational solidarity reminiscent of the petition campaign that resulted in the passage of Jefferson's Statute. The Methodist clergy joined them. Claiming to express the views of 200,000 Virginia Methodists, Richmond area ministers wrote the convention that they were "unalterably and emphatically opposed" to the public funding of "sectarian or any institution not owned and controlled by the State." (39)

Throughout the fall and into December, the Junior Order United American Mechanics (JOUAM) added its voice to that of the Baptists and Methodists. Founded in 1853, this whites-only men's association of skilled workers and managers and its women's auxiliary, the Daughters of Liberty, promoted a blend of patriotism, nationalism, and nativism. They advocated nonsectarian Bible reading in the public schools, urged laws restricting immigration, and opposed "any union of Church and State." They regarded Catholics as their chief opponents. In the 1890s the JOUAM established councils in over twenty states and were a growing presence in Virginia's cities and towns. Whenever a new public school opened, they held dedicatory services, presented the principal with a Bible and a flag, and hosted speeches by local ministers. Their official newspaper, the Virginia Courier, covered such events and reported in March 1901 that the preacher out in Rockingham County had warned "of the great enemy we have to fight the most, and that is Romanism." (40) As the convention opened, Richmond had fourteen councils of men and seven of women, and the Courier encouraged the Junior Order "to let your delegate know your views and your wishes, for he is but your servant, paid to execute your will." At least a dozen Virginia councils petitioned explicitly against public funding of religiously sponsored institutions. (41)

In October, while the JOUAM state convention met in Richmond, the constitutional convention debated the minority resolution. Two issues worried some delegates. First, by forbidding appropriations for institutions not fully owned and controlled by the state, the minority proposal would stop the assembly from helping fund the College of William and Mary. Second, it would prevent Richmond, Norfolk, and other cities from aiding charitable institutions that performed essential services. In both cases, if state and local governments had to assume complete responsibility and pay all the bills, public costs would skyrocket. For the rest of that day, the convention discussed amendments to the minority report that might somehow balance church-state separation with the practical need for social services.

Urban delegates controlled the evening debate. Alexander Hamilton from Petersburg and Samuel Meredith from Richmond each offered amendments to the minority report that were designed chiefly to preserve the cities' authority to make grants to charitable institutions. Robertson of Roanoke, who had served on the legislative committee, stated the issue succinctly. The cities were not appropriating money for religious proselytizing, but simply helping charities in benevolent work that served people of all faiths and none. A wealthy Catholic woman from New York, the wife of Thomas Fortune Ryan, had recently purchased a Roanoke hospital that had been closed by its previous owners. She proposed opening it "for the benefit of all classes" and religions but wanted help from the city council. Roanoke needed that hospital, Robertson insisted. He saw a golden opportunity slipping away. Because convention delegates disliked Catholics, they were going to tie the hands of the city council. How odd, another delegate observed, that nonbelievers could run a hospital with public assistance, but not Catholic or Protestant organizations. In Robertson's view, fear, not reason, controlled the convention's decisions on church-state matters. "For God's sake," he implored, "let us stop talking about churches." (42) Thom echoed his concern. Explaining the situation in Norfolk, he pointed out the enormous savings that religiously based institutions provided the cities.

But what Robertson called "a great bugaboo," Dunaway regarded as a matter of "fundamental principle." (43) Any public assistance to a church-related institution helped advance denominational objectives. A religiously owned and operated hospital, orphan asylum, or home for the aged "breathed a sectarian atmosphere" and conveyed "denominational doctrines." To allocate tax monies for the propagation of religious beliefs violated Jefferson's Statute and the "American doctrine of the separation of church and state," he insisted. In stating that the practice of Virginia's cities violated the United States Constitution, Dunaway overlooked two facts. First, the Supreme Court had not yet applied the First Amendment's religion clause to the states. It would not do so until the 1940s. (44) Second, in 1899 the Court had approved the constitutionality of federal support for church-sponsored institutions. The District of Columbia had funded a Catholic hospital's construction of isolation wards to combat contagious diseases. Because the hospital was separately incorporated from the church, served a secular purpose, and opened its services to all, the Supreme Court had ruled in Bradford v. Roberts that its religious affiliation did not matter. This case set a precedent for church-state contractual relationships in social welfare. (45) None of Dunaway's opponents, however, challenged his interpretation of the First Amendment or mentioned Bradford.

As in the debate over incorporation, Dunaway played on the fear of precedent. From small beginnings "a great crying evil" might well develop with thousands of dollars diverted into sectarian pockets. The Baptist minister emphasized the Catholic charities in Richmond. The Committee on the Legislative Department had been invited to visit the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged where fifteen Sisters supported seventy men and sixty-five women. Though the annual city grant of $500 represented a small portion of the total budget for that institution, Dunaway reverted to principle. "Let every man, let every association do good in all possible ways, ... but then let them not seek a reward for their well-doing by asking for the people's taxes. Cannot we sometimes do good in this world without proclaiming it abroad before the public and going to the public crib to seek a reward for well-doing?" The implication that the sisters received pay for their work provoked Charles Meredith, the Richmond delegate, and Dunaway backpedaled slightly only to repeat his earlier charge, that church-related institutions existed to propagate "sectarian doctrines." (46)

But as the minister rambled across the Virginia landscape citing various institutions that had not requested public support, he tripped. The General Assembly had recently incorporated a Methodist orphanage, and Dunaway averred that the Methodists would not come seeking assistance. That pulled Carter Glass out of his seat. "They have already come," Glass announced. They had asked Lynchburg for thirty-five acres, which the city gave them. Dunaway was surprised, but recovered quickly, stating that Lynchburg would receive a "quid pro quo" in terms of business the asylum would bring to the city. Thus it was purely "a business transaction," which Dunaway would not oppose. Meredith was now roused: "Is not the whole milk in the coaconut [sic] the Catholic question?" he asked, repeating the charge of anti-Catholicism against Dunaway that Robertson had made a few days earlier. The Baptist minister "emphatically" denied it and seized the offensive by stressing the popular support the petitions manifested. "I may be in a minority in this Convention, but I am in a great majority of the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia," he warned his fellow delegates. The Dispatch called it the "strongest speech" he had yet given. (47)

Meredith responded the next day. The fifty-one year old graduate of Richmond College was highly regarded as a brilliant lawyer, eloquent in debate and skilled in cross examination. Though he would die an Episcopalian, he was not yet a communicant of any church. (48) He had thought from the outset that the whole matter should be left, as it presently existed, to the discretion of city governments. His argument rested on the "public purposes" that these charities fulfilled. For the benefit of the delegates, he enumerated in detail the work of each of the private institutions in the capital and contrasted their management "by people who have devoted their lives to the work for the love of God" with "public charities" operated by "paid officials." From a purely financial perspective, if Richmond took over these essential institutions run by religious groups, it would "bankrupt" the city. (49) At the outset of his speech, Meredith had eschewed emotion, but when he described the work of the Little Sisters of the Poor, Meredith attacked Dunaway personally. The Baptist preacher had "dealt most harshly" with these sisters, Meredith said, though they were now taking care of an old Baptist minister. "Consider," the lawyer asked the convention, "when they are attacked, and that denomination is spoken of more harshly by the Baptists than almost any other denomination, that they still hold out their hand, and take up from the place of want and need and suffering a minister of that denomination, and bring him where he can get peace and comfort and rest." Now "they are to be cut off because ... a spirit of Catholicism ... permeates the whole institution, which will injure this man, who is needing help and cannot get it elsewhere." Confederate veterans and old people from all over Virginia lived in their home. To support them the sisters "tread the streets of this city, begging for assistance to help them ... not themselves." (50)

Meredith may have swayed some delegates, but the last word belonged to Robert Turnbull, who had chaired the legislative committee's minority report. A lawyer and former state legislator from Brunswick County, he represented the rural perspective that distinguished the opponents of support for sectarian charities. An Episcopalian, he denied any animosity toward the Catholic Church. But as with other delegates from the countryside, he raised questions during his speech showing that Turnbull possessed very little knowledge about the actual operations of institutions like the Norfolk hospitals or the College of William and Mary. Instead he took refuge in the principle that public funds should only support public institutions and repeatedly raised the fear of future abuses if the private sector received government assistance. Ignoring the urban experience of almost forty years, he warned, "if you ever open the door there is going to be no end of it." (51)

That argument controlled the outcome. By a vote of 33 to 26, the convention voted to prohibit the "appropriation of public funds, or personal property, or real estate" by the legislature or any other governmental authority on any level "to any church or sectarian society, association, or institution." Walton Moore immediately urged a reconsideration of the first vote. Operating on the principle of absolute separation of church and state, the convention had forbidden cities to help the "lovely charities" described by Meredith. Consistency demanded, therefore, that the convention should also end tax exemptions for church property and abolish the Sunday closing laws. The majority was not prepared to go that far. Bending slightly to Moore's position, a heavily amended statement left the state legislature with authority to allow "cities, towns or counties" to assist charitable institutions. (52)

Nothing came of that proviso, however. When the Richmond city council considered its annual allocation of funds, gas, and water for various charitable agencies, the city attorney advised that they could not act without the General Assembly's permission. A bill was working its way through the state Senate in mid January 1903. By a lopsided vote, "being satisfied that an emergency exists," it initially proposed that the officials of any city, town, or county could appropriate "public funds, or personal property, or real estate to any charitable institution or association" they deemed worthy of aid. But then the senators reconsidered. They amended the measure by eliminating towns and counties and restricting it to cities of over 40,000 inhabitants. That meant only Richmond and Norfolk. The Richmond Times meanwhile protested against raising the church-state issue in a matter of "local self-government." Arguing that the state should respect urban needs, the newspaper characterized Richmond's charitable institutions as nonsectarian "public charities" that accepted all and did "great good in relieving distress" and serving "the poor." (53)

As opposing petitions from the Junior Order of United American Mechanics rolled in to the legislature, the House of Delegates balked at the Senate bill and broadened the measure to include other cities and towns. The Senate, however, rejected those amendments, and the bill failed to pass. It would not be revived. In the next year's biennial report for the city of Richmond, all private institutions had been dropped from the list of charities, and the appropriation for maintaining the almshouse and the poor had jumped appreciably. Religiously based and private charitable agencies, or at least most of them, did not fade away, but the government had made a severe disjunction between public and private services. The formal cooperation that had marked the relationship between urban government and private charity in Virginia had ended. (54)

IV. SEPARATING CHURCH AND STATE, VIRGINIA-STYLE

What do these debates and their outcomes tell us about Virginians and their understanding of Jefferson's Statute at the beginning of the twentieth century? First, the arguments over church incorporation and the funding of church-related institutions revealed a significant cleavage between urban and rural delegates. In a state where over eighty percent of the population still lived in the countryside or in small villages or towns, the rural element dominated state politics and controlled the convention. (55) Most Virginians did not realize or appreciate the challenges of an increasingly modern society. The complexities of city life with its attendant problems and demand for institutionalized social services escaped them, just as the need for public education, reform of the penal system, and professional care for the retarded and mentally ill had eluded their ancestors. (56) The prevailing mentality remained a "we take care of our own" conservatism. Living tightly circumscribed lives, they lacked exposure to the socioeconomic conditions and ethnoreligious pluralism that increasingly defined Richmond, Norfolk, and, to a lesser degree, the other growing cities in the Old Dominion. They clung to the past with a vengeance and relied on its aphorisms to guide their lives.

Second, the convention rhetoric often reveals the stubborn persistence of classical republican thought within Virginia's governing class. Socially and politically, these men operated in an eighteenth-century world. Their speeches display a profound distrust of the messiness of democracy. Their principal work would be to curtail it as much as possible. Institutions they did not or could not control were suspect. Refusing to incorporate churches not only checked any pretensions the churches might have to an autonomous existence; it prevented a host of possible dangers that only a few members realized were imaginary. In ominous tones, delegates warned of potential conspiracies, of corruption, wealth, and luxury smothering authentic Christianity. The experience of other states, even of their own history, meant nothing in the face of their fears for the future. They spoke as men besieged. A century and a quarter had passed since Independence, but the continuities in thought over time are remarkable.

Richard Beeman has documented the expansion of tobacco and slaves into Lunenburg County in that earlier era, with its concomitant commitment to agrarianism and slavery, and asserted that slavery provided "the central point of definition for the Southside's white citizens." This in turn went hand in hand with the perpetuation of an "increasingly oligarchic and archaic ... social and political system ... nearly wholly out of step with the pace of American development in the nineteenth century." (57) By the beginning of the twentieth century, racial segregation and disfranchisement replaced slavery, but nothing had really changed in the Virginia mindset. Most convention delegates in 1901 would have found congenial the libertarian republicanism of John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke. These men and their confreres of the old Virginia school with their insistence on strict construction, states rights, and the promotion of agricultural rather than commercial interests shaped the conservative ideology that perdured through the Civil War and into the next century. (58)

Third, this provincial outlook fit neatly with an easily exploited religious prejudice against Catholics, Jews, and any other group that appeared somehow different or strange. Intolerance seldom confines itself to a single object. The reaction against Pollard's proposal to drop the word "Christian" from the Declaration of Rights laid bare the anti-Jewish sentiment. Urban delegates, notably Robertson and Meredith, perceived a harsh anti-Catholicism that drew upon a particular critique of the medieval church for its justification. (59) The fear, which Dunaway played upon several times, that permitting cities to assist sectarian charities would contribute to the propagation of Catholicism probably set some faces firmly against assistance to any church-based institutions. Disparaging remarks made on the convention floor about Christian Scientists and Mormons offer further examples of prejudice. In sum, the "complex of fears and hates," which Wilbur Cash a few decades later identified as the "savage ideal," luxuriated in the Old Dominion. (60) This was, after all, the catalyst that assembled the convention to disfranchise voters on the basis of race and class. It embraced religion also.

What then did Jefferson's Statute mean for this generation? Religious freedom, for everyone; religious equality, certainly for Protestants; church-state separation, applied selectively. Even Pollard wanted Virginia identified as a Christian country. No resolutions embodied Rabbi Calisch's perspective by calling for a ban on religious exercises in the public schools. But the elephant in the living room was tax exemption for churches. Carter Glass raised the issue when Dunaway was railing against incorporation. Corporations and individuals paid taxes, churches did not. Glass thought such "paternalism" should be eliminated. Incorporate the churches and tax them. That would eliminate the dangers of excessive ecclesiastical wealth. But Dunaway saw no need to change Virginia's historic practice. (61)

When the convention debated tax policy in the spring of 1902, virtually everyone professed a desire to end exemptions for churches, but then retreated behind the argument that the people would not stand for it. As attention shifted to the clergymen's homes, the rural-urban division surfaced once again. A delegate from a farm county proposed an amendment to exempt parsonages. In the countryside, he pointed out, one parsonage often served a number of small churches, people struggled financially to support a minister, and a parsonage tax would fall on them. Urban delegates countered that city churches often had no parsonages and so would not share in any tax exemption. As discussion concluded, Dunaway spoke for exempting both churches and parsonages. The convention's foremost exponent of church-state separation now argued for accommodation as he drew maddeningly imprecise lines: "It is not the part of a secular government to support religion," he avowed, but "secular government" needs "religion, in a certain sense, which, if not maintained and fostered, is still recognized and looked favorably upon by the government." That justified tax exemptions for churches. Parsonages should also be exempted, he continued, because "they are along the same line." Dunaway then followed with a long eulogy on the importance of religion to society and the need for government to foster it. Indeed, he concluded, "the very civilization of the Commonwealth is built upon the religion of Jesus Christ." (62)

Few if any of the delegates would have disagreed with the principled preacher. For Virginians, as for most Americans of that age, church-state separation was contextualized by the overwhelming consensus that they were a Christian people. The Old Dominion was committed both to Jefferson's Statute and to Protestant Christianity. It had been for over a century. Few people then, or for decades to come, considered such commitments to be incompatible. TABLE 1. Major Religious Bodies in Virginia, 1906 Total Population (1900): 1,854,184 Total church members: 793,546 Total Protestants: 761,996 Baptists: 415,987 Methodists: 200,771 Presbyterians: 39,628 Episcopalians: 28,487 Disciples: 26,128 Lutherans: 15,010 Dunkers: 11,524 Christians: 8,266 Other: Roman Catholics: 28,700 Jews: 915 (heads of families) Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Special Reports Religion Bodies 1906. Part I: Summary and General Tables (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), 278, 280, 365-368. TABLE 2. Religious Affiliation of Delegates, Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902. Total Number of Delegates: 100 Responses to Questionnaire: 85 Episcopalians: 19 Baptists: 14 Presbyterians: 11 Methodists: 7 Christians: 3 Lutheran: 1 Decline to State: 30 Source: John Garland Pollard, "The Members of the Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902: Data for Biographical Sketches." Typescript. Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.

(1.) A Lilly Faculty Fellowship from the Association of Theological Schools made possible the research for this essay. An earlier version was presented at a meeting of the American Society of Church History on January 4, 2002. The author would like to thank Patricia Bonomi and Mark Noll for their helpful criticism and suggestions.

(2.) John Goode, Recoll of a Lifetime by John Goode of Virginia (New York: Neale, 1906), 209. Goode's autobiography is an excellent, if chilling, source for white attitudes toward race in the early-twentieth-century South. The standard history of the convention is Ralph Clipman McDanel, The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928). See also Allen W. Moger, Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd, 1870-1925 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968), 181-202; Wythe W. Holt, Jr. "The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902: A Reform Movement Which Lacked Substance," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography [hereafter VMHB] 76 (1968): 67-102; and "Virginia's Constitutional Convention of 1901-02," (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1979). For Goode, see Jacob N. Brenaman, A History of Virginia Conventions (Richmond: J. L. Hill, 1902), 99. The best study of southern disfranchisement is Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). For the process in Virginia, see ibid., 195-223.

(3.) See Table 1.

(4.) Richard McIlwaine, Memories of Three Score Years and Ten (New York: Neale, 1908), 364. A solid introduction to southern religion for this period is Kenneth K. Bailey, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1964). For the religious background of the delegates, see Table 2. At this time even people who were not formal church members by baptism or admission to communion regularly attended religious services. For the importance of religion for culture, see Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89-90. For a critique of Geertz, see Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 233-67. See also David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 795.

(5.) For an early expression of this perspective in a legislative debate and its overwhelming acceptance, see Journal of the House of Delegates of Virginia [hereafter JHDV], 2 February 1827, 132-33.

(6.) The text of the Statute is in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 27 vols. to date (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950-), 2:545-53. For its passage, see Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776-1787 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977); and Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 273-95. Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. (1947) at 1. Earlier Chief Justice Morrison Waite emphasized Virginia's experience in passing the statute and Madison's and Jefferson's views as normative for interpreting the First Amendment (Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. [1878] at 164).

(7.) A useful if dated study of one aspect of the Statute's understanding may be found in Sadie Bell, The Church, the State, and Education in Virginia (Philadelphia, Penn.: reprint, Arno, 1969). Cushing Stout refers to Virginia in his overview of the Statute's influence in American history, "Jeffersonian Religious Liberty and American Pluralism," in Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan, eds., The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 201-35. Aspects of Virginia law on church and state are summarized in Paul G. Kauper and Stephen C. Ellis, "Religious Corporations and the Law," Michigan Law Review 71 (1973): 1529-33, 1558-60, 1565-66.

(8.) Harry N. Scheiber urged the integration of legal and constitutional study within a social history context in "American Constitutional History and the New Legal History: Complementary Themes in Two Modes," Journal of American History 68 (1981): 337-50; for this reading of texts, see Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773-97.

(9.) [John Garland Pollard] to John Thompson Brown, 12 June 1902, John Garland Pollard Papers, box 6, folder 155, Earl Gregg Swem Library, the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va. [hereafter WMC]; William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (Richmond: Samuel Pleasants Jr., 1809-1823), 9:111-12. For its passage, see Buckley, Church and State, 17-19.

(10.) Unidentified newspaper [April 1901], Pollard Papers, box 6, folder 155; "State Constitutions Compared. As to Their Two Departments," The Times [Richmond], 22 July 1900. For Pollard's background and political career, see John S. Honeywell, "An Outsider Looking In: John Garland Pollard and Machine Politics in Twentieth Century Virginia," (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1976).

(11.) John Garland Pollard to John L. Williams, 12 July 1901, Pollard Papers, box 6, folder 155.

(12.) "A Warm Reply by Mr. Pollard," Richmond Evening Leader [1901]; Louis C. Phillips to John Garland Pollard, 19 July 1901, Pollard Papers, box 6, folder 155.

(13.) George W. Spooner to John Garland Pollard, [19 June 1901]; John Garland Pollard to George W. Spooner, 19 June 1901, Pollard Papers, box 6, folder 155.

(14.) Myron Berman, Richmond Jewry, 1769-1975: Sabbat in Shockoe (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 241-50; Samuel C. Shepherd, Jr., Avenues of Faith: Shaping the Urban Religious Culture of Richmond, Virginia, 1900-1929 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2001), 45, 202-5; Myron Berman, "Edward Nathan Calisch, An American Rabbi in the South. His Views on the 'Promised Land,'" unpublished paper read at the 70th Annual Meeting of the American Jewish Historical Society held in Richmond, Virginia on 5-7 May, 1972, box 1, Edward N. Calisch Papers, Archives of Beth Ahaba, Richmond, Virginia. Twice in the 1890s Calisch opened Beth Ahaba to Baptist congregations whose churches had burned down. In 1899 an editorial in Richmond's Evening Leader praised his contribution to the city's "religious fellowship" ("Rabbi's Offer of the Synagogue," Richmond News, 22 October 1900; Charles O. Saville to Edward N. Calisch, 2 February 1896; Evening Leader [Richmond], 5 May 1899, Calisch Papers, box 2).

(15.) Edward N. Calisch, "The Democracy of the Public Schools," Virginia School Journal 6 (1897): 152, 153. For samples of school prayers, see "Exercises for Opening School," ibid. 1 (1892): 9.

(16.) Edward N. Calisch to John Garland Pollard, 19 July 1901, Pollard Papers, box 6, folder 155. See also J. Manning Dunaway to John Garland Pollard, 20 July 1901; A. Leo Obedorfer to John Garland Pollard, 20 July 1901, ibid.

(17.) Edward Calisch to John Garland Pollard, 22 July 1901, Pollard Papers, box 6, folder 155.

(18.) "It is Now Decided," Richmond Dispatch, 20 July 1901, Hugh V. Campbell to John Garland Pollard, 20 July 1901; and Calisch to Pollard, 22 July 1901, Pollard Papers, box 6, folder 155. For Trinity Methodist, see Shepherd, Avenues of Faith, 41; and for M. Ashby Jones, ibid., 219, 220, 261, 294. The convention ultimately "proclaimed" the constitution rather than submit it for ratification by the state's voters.

(19.) James H. Lindsay, Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention, State of Virginia. Held in the City of Richmond June 12, 1901 to June 26, 1902 (Richmond: Hermitage, 1906), 328-30 [hereafter Debates].

(20.) Calisch to Pollard, 18 September 1901, Pollard Papers, box 6, folder 155. Calisch's judgment may not seem excessively harsh when one considers the speech that followed Pollard's by Joseph Wysor, a Democrat from Southwest Virginia. He announced that he would vote to retain "Christian" in the Bill of Rights "[b]ecause Christianity redeems womanhood, which made us all we are and all we expect to be" (Debates, 330).

(21.) "Minutes of Meetings of Committee on Legislation." Convention of 1901-1902, Committee on Legislative Dept., 21 June 1901, 14-15, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Va. [hereafter LVA].

(22.) Acts of Assembly, 1851-1852, 332. For this legal struggle, see Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., "After Disestablishment: Thomas Jefferson's Wall of Separation in Antebellum Virginia," Journal of Southern History 61 (1995): 445-80.

(23.) [Robert P. Kerr to Alfred P. Thom], quoted in Debates, 776; "Minutes of Committee on Legislation," 21 July 1901, 107, LVA.

(24.) "Minutes of Committee on Legislation," 23, 30 July 1901, 16-17, 108, LVA; Debates, 761-62, 774. For Moore, see Brenaman, Virginia Conventions, 101.

(25.) Debates, 761-62. For Dunaway, see Religious Herald [Richmond], 6 July 1916; Richmond Times, 12 June 1916. For this concern in the postbellum era from an important Presbyterian clergyman and professor, see [Robert Lewis Dabney], "Ecclesiastical Accumulations of Wealth," in Southern Review 11 (1872): 417-37.

(26.) Debates, 733-44; quotes at 733, 734, 738, and 744. A sketch of Robertson's life is in Abram P. Staples, "William Gordon Robertson," in John B. Minor, ed., Report of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Virginia State Bar Association, 33 (1910): 100-109.

(27.) Debates, 744-55; quotes on 744, 750, 751, 753, 754. For the background to Dunaway's (and Plumer's) historical interpretation of the medieval church, see S. J. Barnett, Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism (New York: St. Martins, 1999).

(28.) Debates, 755-59; quotations on 755, 756, 759.

(29.) Debates, 759-67; quote on 766. For Stebbins, see Lyon G. Tyler, ed., Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography (New York: Lewis Historical, 1915), 4:380-84; for Glass, see Tyler, ed., Encyclopedia, 1:311-15; and Harold Wilson, "The Role of Carter Glass in the Disfranchisement of the Virginia Negro," The Historian 32 (1969): 69-82. For the French policy, see Andrew C. Gould, Origins of Liberal Dominance: State, Church, and Party in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

(30.) Debates, 767-71; quotes on 767, 768, and 771.

(31.) Debates, 771-82; quotes on 775-76, 778, 779, 781.

(32.) "Minutes of Committee on Legislation," 28 June 1901, 16-17, LVA; Resolutions, Ordinances and Petitions [Submitted to the Constitutional Convention of Virginia in 1901-1902], [Richmond, 1901], Virginia Historical Society, Richmond [hereafter VHS].

(33.) Journal of Common Council, City of Richmond, 12 November 1866, 29 January, 11 November, 30 December 1967, 5 January, 14 December 1868, 29 December, 1869, 10 January, 16, 30 May, 7 June, 1870, 18, 50, 51, 184, 207-8, 283, 346, 502, 536, 618, 620, 626. Constitution and Rules and Regulations of St. Paul's Church Home, Richmond, Va. (Richmond: Clemmit and Jones, 1870), 4; After One Hundred Years, 1834-1934: Being the Story of Saint Joseph's Academy and Orphan Asylum Told in a Series of Sketches (Richmond: privately printed, [1934]), 9-13; Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J., Commonwealth Catholicism: A History of the Catholic Church in Virginia (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 164-76. For an antebellum tribute to the Sisters of Charity, see "Old Maids," Southern Literary Messenger 3 (1837): 473-74. Annual Reports of the City Departments of Richmond, Va. for the Year ending January 31st, 1873 (Richmond: Evening News Steam Presses, 1873), 160; Ann Rutherford Lower, Sheltering Arms Hospital: A Centennial History (1889-1989) (Richmond: William Byrd, 1989), 73; Fogarty, Commonwealth Catholicism, 230-31; Retreat for the Sick, Broadside, VHS; Sheltering Arms Hospital, 1894-1914, summary notes from minutes (typescript), VHS.

(34.) Donna Audriot, Population Abstract of the United States. 1993 edition (McLean, Va.: Documents Index, [1993]), 690-91; Certain Resolutions and Ordinances of the Council of the City of Richmond for the Years Commencing with ... 1898, and ending with ... 1900 (Richmond: Ware and Duke, 1900), 140; Debates, 796.

(35.) J. L. M. Curry, "Pauperism--Sectarian Appropriations--Public Schools," Religious Herald (Richmond), 27 May 1878.

(36.) The controversy is reprinted in Charles F. James, Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia (Lynchburg, Va.: J. P. Bell, 1900), appendix, 241-55. For Henry's reply, see William Wirt Henry, "The Presbyterian Church and Religious Liberty in Virginia," Union Seminary Magazine 12 (1900-1901): 16-31.

(37.) Minutes of the 118th Annual Session of the Dover Baptist Association, held with the Leigh-Street Baptist Church, of Richmond, Virginia, July 23, 24, 25, 1901 (Richmond, 1901), 25.

(38.) The Religious Herald, 5 September 1901.

(39.) "Minutes of Committee on Legislation," 2, 18, 21 July 1901, 102, 106, 107, LVA; Journal of the Constitutional Convention of Virginia. Held in the City of Richmond, Beginning June 12th, 1901 (Richmond: J. H. O'Bannon, 1901), 22, 30, 31 August, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 13, 23, September, 7 October 1901, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 161, 163, 166, 181, 198; "Resolved, That the Methodist ministers," 31 August 1901, Resolutions, Ordinances and Petitions, VHS.

(40.) "Declaration of Principles," The Virginia Courier (Petersburg), 1 June 1896; "A Big Day in the Valley, ibid., 1 March 1901; Greg D. Kimball, "The Working People of Richmond: Life and Labor in an Industrial City, 1865-1920," Labor's Heritage, 3 (1991): 42.

(41.) Richmond and Manchester City Directory, 1901, 1321; Virginia Courier, 15 August 1901; Richmond Dispatch, 13 October 1901; Journal of the Convention, 23, 24, 26, 27 September, 1, 2, 3, 4, 11 October, 8, 9 November, 3 December 1901, 181, 183, 185, 186, 190, 192, 193, 195, 204, 231, 233, 258.

(42.) Debates, 794.

(43.) Ibid., 793, 795. Dunaway pointed out that the resolution had two parts. The first was directed against appropriations for sectarian institutions. The second opposed funding in whole or in part any institution that the state did not completely own and control. Recognizing the great concern over support for the College of William and Mary, Dunaway suggested that each part be treated separately and expressed a personal indifference toward the second (ibid., 797).

(44.) Rabbi Calisch would have agreed with Dunaway. At the beginning of the century, a New Jersey judge had refused to allow the testimony of a Chinese non-Christian on the grounds that he could not take a Christian oath. In a newspaper article, Calisch castigated that decision and interpreted the First Amendment to state that "Congress, (and consequently any individual state, for no state has powers superior to the United States) shall make no law." It also violated the Fourteenth Amendment that safeguarded "an equal right to the protection and the benefits of the law." (E[dward] N[athan] C[alisch], "An Unrighteous Decision," unidentified newspaper clipping, unnumbered Miscellaneous Box, Calisch Papers). In the same article, the rabbi explained the basis for his concern with a possible reference to the dispute over the wording of the sixteenth article of the Bill of Rights at the Virginia convention: "We Jews are interested in this, both as citizens and as Jews. We have been constantly fighting the purblind fanaticism that is seeking to place sectarian recognition in the constitution, in the public schools and wherever else it can" (ibid.).

(45.) Debates, 801; Bradford v. Roberts 175 U.S. (1899) at 291; J. Bruce Nichols, The Uneasy Alliance: Religion, Refugee Work, and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 216-17.

(46.) Debates, 803.

(47.) Debates, 805, 806; "Yesterday's Proceedings," Dispatch, 16 October 1901.

(48.) Brockenbrough Lamb, "Charles V. Meredith," Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting. The Virginia State Bar Association ... 1930 ([Richmond: Virginia Bar Association, 1930]), 245-52; Debates, 812.

(49.) Debates, 806, 807.

(50.) Debates, 808, 809.

(51.) Debates, 815; for Turnbull, see Brenaman, Virginia Conventions, 103.

(52.) Debates, 815, 816, 818. The final vote was 42 to 15. As Dunaway had suggested, the second part of the resolution, which banned aid to institutions not completely owned by the government, went down to defeat, 24 to 30.

(53.) Board of Alderman Journal, 1902-1903, 9 December 1902, 15 January, 1903, 145, 158-59, Archives, Richmond Public Library; "A Bill to Authorize ... Appropriations to Charitable institutions or associations," Bill 155, Rough House Bills, Resolutions, etc., 1902-1904, box 62, LVA; Journal of the Senate of Virginia [hereafter JSV], 14, 15 January 1903, 158, 162, microfilm, LVA; "Local Charities," Richmond Times, 16 January 1903.

(54.) JHDV, 15 January, 2, 3 February, 3, 4, 10, 11, 13, 17 March 1903, 198, 271, 176, 409, 419, 452, 460, 477, 491; JSV, 16 March 1903, 336. For the involvement of Protestant churches in social work after 1902, see Shepherd, Avenues of Faith, 137-67. See also, Arthur W. James, Virginia's Social Awakening: The Contribution of Dr. Mastin and the Board of Charities and Corrections (Richmond: Garrett and Massie, 1942).

(55.) In 1900 the urban population of Virginia numbered 340,000 out of 1.85 million people or 18 percent (U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, I [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976], 36). A fine essay that discusses rural-urban relationships in the antebellum period and argues for continuity after the Civil War is David Goldfield, "Urban-Rural Relations in Old Virginia," in Region, Race, and Cities: Interpreting the Urban South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1997): 69-86.

(56.) Norman Dain, Disordered Minds: The First Century of Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia, 1766-1866 (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, distributed by University Press of Virginia, 1971); and Paul W. Keve, The History of Corrections in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986) are useful studies. The history of the struggle for public education in Virginia remains to be written but see J. L. Blair Buck, The Development of Public Schools in Virginia, 1607-1952 (Richmond: Virginia State Board of Education, 1952); Barbara J. Griffin, "Thomas Ritchie and the Founding of the Richmond Lancasterian School," VMHB 86 (1978): 447-60; Douglas R. Egerton, "To the Tombs of the Capulets: Charles Fenton Mercer and Public Education in Virginia, 1816-1817," VMHB 93 (1985): 155-74; Thomas C. Hunt, "Popular Education in Nineteenth-Century Virginia: The Efforts of Charles Fenton Mercer," Paedagogica Historica 21 (1981): 337-46; and "Henry Ruffner and the Struggle for Public Schools in Antebellum Virginia," American Presbyterians 64 (1986): 18-26; and Harold Leonard Hellenbrand, "The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Community in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson," (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1980).

(57.) Richard R. Beeman, The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746-1832, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 218, 225, 226.

(58.) See Robert E. Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline: Pastoral Republican (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980); and Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). For the decline of Jefferson's influence in his native state, see Noble E. Cunningham, Jr. In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 348; Daniel P. Jordan, Political Leadership in Jefferson's Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 205-24; and Kathryn Malone, "The Fate of Revolutionary Republicanism in Early National Virginia," Journal of the Early Republic 7 (1987): 27-51.

(59.) For Richmond's prejudice against Jews and Catholics in the early twentieth century, see Shepherd, Avenues of Faith, 204-5, 206-11. A perceptive analysis of Protestant-Jewish relations in the South generally is in David Goldfield, "Jews, Blacks, and Southern Whites, in Region, Race, and Cities, 145-62.

(60.) Debates, 2683, 2686; W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1941), 341-43.

(61.) Debates, 751. See also ibid, 792.

(62.) Debates, 2687-92, quotes at 2692. For an excellent study of religious tax exemption, see John Witte Jr., Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000), 185-215.

Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., is a professor of American religious history at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley.