Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (39 page)

All of these newspapers published the treaty without editorializing, with one exception.
William
Cobbett, Federalist editor of the
Porcupine Gazette
of Philadelphia, objected to the treaty’s religious implications, in a paragraph appended to the text in the June 23, 1797, edition:

Cobbett, a Federalist, was in a political bind. He wished to criticize the basic premise that the U.S. government was “in no sense founded on the Christian religion” without criticizing the Federalist president who had negotiated the treaty and the Federalist senators who had already ratified it.
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To him, the article seemed an attack on Christianity, and what he presumed to be the Christian character of his nation. And so he deflected the blame, speculating that Muslim officials in Tripoli or the American diplomat Joel Barlow were responsible for this article of the treaty.
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John Adams had written that even by comparison to Thomas Paine, there “was not a more worthless fellow” than Joel Barlow.
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The article was indeed consistent with Barlow’s views on government and religion, and he likely was involved in crafting it. His ideas, however, were not unique but already well represented in the domestic politics of the United States.
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Appointed U.S. consul to Algiers in February 1796, Joel Barlow was predictably on hand to sign and verify the final version of the Tripoli
treaty in North Africa in January 1797.
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After taking a degree from Yale in 1778, he served as a chaplain during the Revolutionary War. His views of religion changed, however, when he traveled to Europe, where he met Jefferson and Paine and, like them, came to embrace the French Revolution.
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Barlow’s
Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe
(1792), reveals his aversion to religious violence and hints at his influence on Article 11.
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He decries the millions of deaths in Europe resulting from “persecution of the Christian church,”
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writing that “any mode of worship declared to be national” was antithetical to religious “liberty,” a standard Deist claim.
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He concludes with a declaration about Christianity and the United States that would seem to suggest his influence on Article 11:

Clearly, he meant that there was no established Christian faith in the United States, a fact in no way at odds with the free exercise of religion by the varied Protestant Christian majority. In fact, the assertion of the United States as “not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” was already implicitly enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment.
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And it had proponents other than Barlow. In 1803, in the midst of Jefferson’s naval conflict with Tripoli, Secretary of State James Madison would also implicitly affirm the principle of Article 11 of the 1797 treaty, which he considered for the purposes of diplomacy with North African rulers a point in favor of the United States as compared with European Christian powers. He wrote the U.S. consul general at Algiers to remind him to press it:

But Madison was not merely being an opportunistic diplomat in 1803, his point being entirely consistent with his earlier attempts to end the establishment of Christianity in Virginia in 1785, and his support of Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which passed the following year.

Even before the U.S. Constitution affirmed that there would be no religious test for federal officeholders and the First Amendment denied any “establishment of religion,” James Madison had promoted a religiously plural vision of the United States not unlike Jefferson’s. While the latter was in France, Madison had cleared the way for the passage of his comrade’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. In 1785 his own brilliant
A Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments
railed against the proposal that Virginia tax proceeds be allocated to pay for the propagation of Anglican Christianity, the state’s established religion. In the third article of his tract Madison rejects an establishment of any form of Christianity:

And in the ninth article he argues for universal religious equality:

Such was Madison’s appreciation of how inimical any established faith was to his conception of his nation.

Though Madison had been unable to persuade his neighbor George Washington to sign the
Memorial
, Washington would independently express his strenuous support of religious freedom for all, including Muslims:

Washington knew that the hope of “relief” for non-Christians was small, because they would be forced to pay to support a religion they rejected, and so he wished that “the assessment had never been agitated” and would “die an easy death.”
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He would not, however, go so far as to oppose a probable majority in support of the measure.

But many others did express a wish for an end to a Christian religious establishment in Virginia. One group of Protestant petitioners from Chesterfield County wrote in support of Madison’s
Memorial and Remonstrance
on November 14, 1785. In protesting the payment of teachers of Christianity with state taxes, they argued forcefully for a religiously plural Virginian society: “Let Jews, Mehomitans, and Christians of every Denomination enjoy religious liberty,” and “thrust them not out by establishing the Christian religion lest thereby they become our own enemys and weaken this infant state.”
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Moreover, these Protestant petitioners reminded the Virginia House of Delegates that “it is mens labour in our manufacturies, their services by sea and land that aggrandize our country and not their creed.”
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Civic contributions, not faith, were the proper standard of belonging for Jews and Muslims, not just Christians. Was this not an early domestic political statement compatible with Article 11 of the Tripoli treaty? Such sentiments had deep roots in European Protestantism, in which from the seventeenth century a significant minority had affirmed that religion was a private matter of conscience, between the believer and God. This relationship must always be exempt from any government control.

Barlow’s contributions to the Tripoli treaty, however objectionable to the editor Cobbett, did not otherwise stir debate, either in the Senate or local newspapers. Having been circulating since Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom of 1779 and Madison’s
Memorial and Remonstrance
of 1785, they were not unusual in eighteenth-century American thought.

Ironically, although Barlow attested to the accuracy of the treaty’s text, because neither he nor any of his colleagues could read Arabic, he had to rely on European go-betweens to vet the agreement,
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and he probably never knew that Article 11 never existed in an Arabic translation.
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The discrepancy would remain undiscovered until 1930, when a Dutch scholar was hired by the State Department to examine the Arabic document.
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Nevertheless, similarly accepting language about Islam would appear in later treaties with North Africa—in both Arabic and English—endorsed by Thomas Jefferson, and later adopted by James Madison.

President John Adams’s campaign against the challenger Thomas Jefferson in the
election of 1800 has been termed the first “smear campaign” in American electoral history—and it was the first, but not the last, in which a presidential candidate was accused of being a Muslim.
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The Republican Jefferson’s religious beliefs figured centrally in Federalist attacks, with Jefferson wrongly portrayed as an atheist and, more accurately, a Deist.
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Sometimes he was also called an “infidel,” a term suggesting not only one who has rejected Christianity but also “an adherent of a religion opposed to Christianity,” specifically a Muslim.
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It was a somewhat more subtle application of the tactic pioneered by John Quincy Adams in 1791, with the Federalists using slogans like “God and a religious president” or “Jefferson and no God.”
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The basis for the strategy was to play on the perception that America was a Christian nation and that the danger of a non-Christian president was imminent in Jefferson.
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It remained the worst fear of some Americans that a Muslim infidel might be elected, a possibility that the recently ratified Constitution, lacking a religious test for office, made theoretically
possible. Mobilization of voters against Jefferson on grounds of religion was in effect an attempt to enforce such a test, a popular objective now plainly unconstitutional.
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Federalist clergymen were particularly keen to relitigate the religion question in the presidential contest. One Dutch Reformed minister asked, “Would Jews or Mahometans, consistently with their belief, elect a Christian?” Believing that he knew the answer, he insisted that Christians should be no “less zealous and active than they” in seeking to elect John Adams, a true Christian, as president.
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Jefferson’s own words had rendered his Christianity suspect and him vulnerable to this attack. It was his now famous pluralist utterance published fifteen years earlier in
Notes on Virginia
that his adversaries repeatedly cited: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
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Historians have pointed out, with a latter-day irony missing in the eighteenth century, that “Jefferson’s much vaunted toleration of all religion proved that he was no true Christian.”
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One irony lost at the time was that Jefferson himself had used the word “infidel” to similar calumnious effect in 1776 against George III. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson decried the king’s support for the slave trade, comparing it to the North African Muslim pirates’ taking of captives: “This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.”
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Jefferson’s words were excised in the final draft, as he explained in his autobiography, in deference to South Carolina and Georgia as well as “our northern brethren” who “had very few slaves themselves” but were “pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
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The term “infidel” as a synonym for Muslim remained one of the worst insults an American could hurl, whether against the British king or a fellow presidential candidate, from 1776 to 1800—and beyond. In an 1801 letter to a close friend a few months after his inauguration, Jefferson would lament the religious nature of these political slurs: “what an effort, my dear Sir, of bigotry in Politics & Religion have we gone through.”
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As president he would eschew this bigotry whether waging a naval action against Tripoli or making a peace treaty with the same North African nation.