TJ and the Liberties: That infamous letter

A letter such as the one sent by the Danbury Baptist Association to a sitting president needed to be answered. When I first read it, I was a little confused because the letter doesn't seem to indicate that the writers knew anything about the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, which were ratified a decade before they contacted President Jefferson. 

Now I wonder if they were testing the President. How committed was he to religious freedom? After all, his politics trended to a "states' rights" perspective. Now that he held the president, would he commit to defending religious rights for everyone as part of the duties of his office, or might he side with states that had enacted establishment legislation and defer to them in the hopes that they, like his home state, might see the light and disestablish their Christian denominations?

I've not read widely enough to settle these questions. But keep them in mind when you consider the contents of the letter. Take a minute (maybe two) to read the letter for yourself. It's short.

Letter to the Danbury Baptists

First you need to know that this is the final copy of the letter as sent to the association. His initial letter is somewhat different, and about 1998, at the request of the Library of Congress the original draft of the letter was sent to the FBI so they could advanced technology to recover the original draft hidden under the strikeouts Jefferson made while revising the letter. 

After Jefferson wrote his initial draft, he sent it to two of his Cabinet members: Postmaster General Gideon Granger of Connecticut and Attorney General Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts, both of whose states had made Congregationalism the established religion and both which states would take a little more than a decade to disestablish. Both men were Republicans

Primarily what this indicates is that Jefferson didn't just dash off a reply to the Danbury Baptists as a courtesy. He put thought into his answer and checked with trusted associates of the region to gain their insight. He might not have been aware that this letter would be a flash point of discussion for two centurie, but he was aware it was a political response.

In this original draft Jefferson took a bit of time to explain why he did not issue proclamations for national days of fasting or thanksgiving the way Washington and Adams did. The Republicans of Jefferson's day opposed such proclamations, which suited Jefferson. After agreeing with the Baptists' freedom of individual conscience argument, and references the First Amendment, which he believed built a wall of separation between church and state. 

Because of this understanding "I have refrained from prescribing even those occasional performances of devotion, practiced indeed by the Executive of another nation [England] as the legal head of the church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect. 

An earlier version states that he confines himself to the duties of his office, which he considers to be "merely temporal," and promises that the Baptists'  religious rights will never be infringed by anything he does while in office. 

Not all these sentiments appear in the final version. The concept that the First Amendment was an act of the whole American people remained as did his understanding that the Amendment built a wall of separation. 

The language he uses seems to me to be confined to the national legislature but expresses the hope that all the states will come to agree that disestablishment is the proper course. 

This letter expressed his vision and hopes for the young nation. To dismiss it as "just a letter" seems folly to me.

Image: The original marked up draft of Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists. Taken from the Library of Congress website, loc.gov.