Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (34 page)

The Federalist Johnston was held in such high esteem in North Carolina that he was unanimously elected to be president of the state convention to ratify the Constitution, despite an overwhelming majority of Anti-Federalist delegates.
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Johnston took up Iredell’s arguments regarding Muslims, Catholics, and Jews. A less forceful orator than his brother-in-law, he concentrated on refining the limits of both tolerance and political equality. Like Iredell, Johnston attempted to remind his audience that “it would have been dangerous, if Congress could intermeddle with the subject of religion.” He described “true religion” as “derived from a much higher source than human laws,” a plea not unlike that made by Thomas Jefferson as well as Iredell for the separation of matters divine and political. Johnston warned, “When any attempt is made, by any government, to restrain men’s consciences, no good consequence can possibly follow.”
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Johnston extended the range of absurd presidential contenders proposed by Iredell beyond just the pope and European crowned heads: “It might as well be said that … the Grand
Turk, could be chosen to that office. It would have been as good an argument.”
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Johnston’s dismissive twinning of the pope and the sultan harkened to nightmares of the Reformation precisely in order to expose them as ludicrous and thereby dispel them, together with the tyrannical associations of Islam. He also sought to sunder the old associations of both Jews and Muslims with pagans. The first two, he implicitly acknowledged, might be eligible for elective office. At any rate, he wished to stress their common plight as scorned religious groups, and a certain parallelism in their woes that ought to be remedied in tandem: If Jews gained the right to elected office, then so should Muslims.

Under the new Constitution, the office of the presidency would indeed be open to Muslims in theory, but Federalists implied that they would be excluded in practice. Thus, while admitting the possibility of Jews and Muslims as officials—“It is apprehended that Jews, Mahometans, pagans &c., may be elected to high offices under the government of the United States”—Johnston nevertheless took pains to assure the opposition that the presidency was safe from non-Christians: “Those who are Mahometans, or any others who are not professors of the Christian religion, can never be elected to the office of President, or other high office, but in one of two cases.”
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These possible scenarios were far-fetched enough to comfort his listeners:

It may seem quite plausible to us that civic virtue, “notwithstanding religion,” could make a man electable. But no delegate at the time, Johnston included, could have imagined a single factor of individual qualification more compelling than religion. Their world of difference and inclusion could not be defined without it, and therefore nor could practical access to political power, whatever the Constitution might say. Legal status in European and American societies had always been
predicated upon a faith-based hierarchy. Johnston’s delineation of these two implausible exceptions to Protestant majority rule was intended to show precisely the status quo as immutable: “I leave it to gentlemen’s candor to judge what probability there is of the people’s choosing men of different sentiments from themselves.”
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And so a principle of inclusion would spare America the woes of Europe, but the normative impulse to exclude would safeguard the nation from untoward consequences.

Thus Johnston indicated how America could seem simultaneously both politically inclusive and exclusive, with respect to both Muslims
and Jews. His brother-in-law’s brave words, “if you admit the least difference, the door to persecution is opened,” were only words after all, a flight of idealism alongside a more practical defense of toleration: “it is never to be supposed that the people of America will trust their dearest rights to persons who have no religion at all, or a religion materially different from their own.”
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Thus both Federalists championed the value of principles whose full practical application they would never have supported in practice. Ultimately, the rhetoric of these Federalists was fairly aligned with the prejudices of their opponents, like David
Caldwell, who feared that Jews, most particularly, and others from “the eastern hemisphere” might migrate and overwhelm the electoral process of the United States. The Federalists’ backsliding from stated ideals was calculated to advance the one goal they truly wished to realize: to win enough votes for a Constitution opposed by the majority of North Carolina delegates.

Although Jews represented the tiniest minority of non-Protestants in 1788, the Presbyterian minister
David Caldwell (d. 1824) worried about the immigration of more of them to the United States. The Pennsylvania native had begun as a carpenter, before proposing to his three younger brothers that he would forgo his share in their parents’ farm if they would help send him to college. Caldwell attended the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, graduating in 1761. Two years later he would be ordained, finally to begin his ministry in Guilford, North Carolina, in 1765.
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He became pastor in 1768 of Alamance and Buffalo Church, a position he held for the next sixty years, living to nearly a hundred.
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Caldwell also established the “Log College,” a school for the classical and theological education of young men, in 1767. He taught fifty to sixty students per year, among them future governors of several states, members of Congress, lawyers, physicians, and ministers. Ordering medical books from Philadelphia, he also became a self-taught physician.
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As he could not raise his eight sons and one daughter on his minister’s pay of two hundred dollars a year, he eventually relied on his 791 acres tended by eight slaves.
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Caldwell had been the delegate who insisted on a religious test to exclude both Jews and Catholics (and by extension, Muslims) from the North Carolina state constitution in 1776. The same determination would move him twelve years later to oppose the omission of a religious test in the Constitution. Holding forth on the threat of Jews to the nation, he was adamant that Christianity was essential to a virtuous citizenry:

As a parting shot, Caldwell allowed, “All those who have any religion are against the emigration of people from the eastern hemisphere.”
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Johnston, the Federalist, agreed with him. While admitting the possibility of more Jews and other non-Christians entering the country, he assured his opponent that “in proportion to the emigration of Christians who should come from other countries; that, in all probability the children even of such people would be Christians; and that this, with the rapid population of the United States, their zeal for religion, and love of liberty, would, he trusted, add to the progress of the Christian religion among us.”
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Clearly, neither the Anglican Johnston nor the Presbyterian Caldwell saw any value in debating which Protestant denomination deserved to prevail. It was enough that they agreed upon the impossibility that “the people of America lay aside the Christian religion altogether.”
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Could a Muslim be president of the United States? The assurance of the Federalists Iredell and Johnston that it was possible only in theory failed to persuade the Anti-Federalist William
Lancaster, a Baptist minister, who believed, along with his constituents from Franklin County, that a religious test was the only certain way of keeping objectionable religious groups from the highest offices in the land.
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He argued for upholding the state’s current religious test, which made officeholding exclusively Protestant. He declared:

Lancaster took Iredell’s point about the pope: “For my part, in reviewing the qualifications necessary for a President, I did not suppose that the pope could occupy the President’s chair.” However, in a country without a religious test, where office was open to all free white men, he argued, anything short of papal usurpation might well happen, including a presidency occupied by a representative of either of the two faiths that had sown terror in the hearts of Protestants since the Reformation. Lancaster saw real and present danger in what Federalists would present as absurdities:

While avoiding hyperbolic speculation about the pope or the Ottoman sultan, Lancaster focused on the somewhat more plausible future notion of an individual Catholic or Muslim. His vision of the world in four or five hundred years did not require a majority Catholic or Muslim population. Nor was it predicated on the emergence of Catholic or Muslim candidates so extraordinary that their countrymen would
ignore religion and look only to excellence of character. Lancaster did not hang his fears on the two improbable scenarios that Johnston had described. It was enough for him that a non-Protestant president existed at the farthest edge of possibility; not feeling obliged to describe the unknowable future, he remained “most certain” that the presidency needed to be protected from the equal threats of a Catholic or a Muslim occupant. Thus the office became the focus of contestation between those determined to preserve Protestant hegemony and those who believed in an alternative of potential pluralism made possible by the elimination of religious tests for federal officeholders.

Catholicism and Judaism would have been better understood than Islam, but extant prejudices against adherents of the first two provided a serviceable enough template for characterizing those of the third, with whom the delegates had no direct acquaintance. Throughout the day’s debate the three groups were linked together, with each stirring negative associations among the Protestant delegates. But if Muslims, Jews, and Catholics collectively embodied all that was alien and menacing to the American status quo, they also became simultaneously emblematic of the principles of universal religious freedom and political equality enshrined in the Constitution, principles that were uniquely American and that for many, Federalist and Anti-Federalist alike, had their own allure, irrespective of the chance of undesirable consequences. Assumed commonality would never be a basis for resident Jews and Catholics to make common cause; even after the ratification of the Constitution, they would remain enemies with similar problems.
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And throughout the eighteenth century, whenever compared with Muslims, Jews would perceive an insult meant to cast them beyond the pale of full and equal rights.
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Nevertheless, the three groups would continue united in the Protestant imagination, with arguments for and against their inclusion whenever definitions of rights and citizenship were discussed.

These three groups of non-Protestants were certainly considered outsiders. Each had a unique history and negative resonance for the Protestant delegates to the North Carolina constitutional convention. What these linkages provoked in their minds was precisely the challenge of a powerful, non-Protestant political category in which the most derided outsiders to the new country might one day become insiders. But the rights of Muslims, Jews, and Catholics to be insiders remained a primary fear for their Anti-Federalist opponents. Federalists defended political equality for Muslims, Jews, and Catholics even as
they argued that the Protestant majority would most probably never elect them to any office. Arguments about the exclusion or inclusion of Muslims, Jews, and Catholics united them in eighteenth-century definitions of citizenship and rights.

Despite Iredell’s eloquent attempts to win ratification and defend the rights of future American Muslim citizens, the Federalists had been outnumbered from the first. In the end, predictably, North Carolina’s Anti-Federalist majority at this first convention would prevail by a landslide vote of 184 to 84.
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Technically, the majority of the delegates “chose neither to ratify nor reject the Constitution,” preferring instead to adopt a resolution in support of placing before Congress “a declaration of rights, asserting and securing from encroachment the great principles of civil and religious liberty, and the unalienable rights of the people.” This included a desire to clarify other “ambiguous and exceptionable” parts of the document, presumably including the abolition of religious tests.
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When Iredell attempted to circumvent this decision with a resolution for ratification with a request for amendments, his initiative was overwhelmingly defeated.
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All those who spoke against the Constitution in the debate on religious tests also voted against ratification, with the outline roughly tracking religious affiliation and socioeconomic status. Iredell and Johnston, both lawyers and Anglicans, representatives of a privileged set, were staunch Federalists. The less affluent likes of the Baptist preachers
Abbot and Lancaster, as well as the Presbyterian minister
Caldwell, remained opposed.
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