Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (76 page)

95.
Pasley, “Cheese,” 47.

96.
“From the Committee of Cheshire, Massachusetts,” December 30, 1801,
Papers of Thomas Jefferson
, 36:249.

97.
Pasley, “Cheese,” 45; Dreisbach, “Mr. Jefferson,” 743–45; Oberg, “Editorial Note,”
Papers of Thomas Jefferson
, 36:246–49.

98.
Butterfield, “John Leland,” 214–18.

99.
“Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes,” January 1, 1802,
Papers of Thomas Jefferson
, 36:261. Jefferson weighed the cheese at 1,230 pounds. Butterfield, “Leland,” 220, quotes a newspaper source that asserts the weight was 1,238 pounds.

100.
Pasley, “Cheese,” 36; Oberg, “Editorial Note,”
Papers of Thomas Jefferson
, 36:253.

101.
“Letter from Danbury Baptist Association to Thomas Jefferson,” October 7, 1801, in
The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Church-State Relations in the American Founding
, ed. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009), 526.

102.
Ibid.; Lambert,
Founding Fathers
, 284–85.

103.
Pasley, “Cheese,” 36, emphasizes the day’s importance.

104.
“Draft Reply to the Danbury Baptist Association,” on or before December 31, 1801,
Papers of Thomas Jefferson
, 36:255 n. 2. Italics are mine.

105.
“To the Danbury Baptist Association,” January 1, 1802,
Papers of Thomas Jefferson
, 36:258.

106.
Butterfield, “John Leland,” 226.

107.
Ibid., 226–27.

108.
Quoted ibid., 226.

109.
Quoted ibid., 170–71.

110.
Quoted ibid., 226–27.

111.
Ibid., 227.

112.
Pasley, “Cheese,” 80.

113.
Leland,
Writings
, 255.

114.
Ibid., 373.

115.
Butterfield, “John Leland,” 212–13.

116.
Leland,
Writings
, 213.

117.
Ibid., 353–54.

118.
Ibid., 355–56.

119.
The phrase and source of contrast is that of
William G. McLoughlin,
Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630–1833
(Hanover, NH: Brown University Press/University Press of New England, 1991), 195.

120.
McLoughlin distinguishes Leland from Isaac Backus and most other Baptists, stating that Leland, “regarding separation of church and state … like Roger Williams, favored total separation, not sweet harmony [with Christianity] like Backus”; see McLouglin,
New England Dissent
, 2:292; Edwin S. Gaustad, “The Backus-Leland Tradition,”
Foundations
22 (October 1959): 131–52.
Philip Hamburger, however, who dubs Leland “Jefferson’s friend and ally,” disagrees directly but incorrectly with McLoughlin on Leland’s church-state separation position. Hamburger asserts, “Even Leland, however, did not clearly wish to separate church and state. Although, in attacking the existing connection between church and state, he used language that may, in retrospect,
seem to come close to a demand for separation, he did not unequivocally go so far, and indeed, he typically demanded a religious liberty that remained unmistakably within Baptist and other evangelical dissenting traditions.” See Philip Hamburger,
Separation of Church and State
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), quotations on 165 and 169, respectively. In fact, Leland’s evangelical Baptist vision of an absolute separation of church and state connected him directly to seventeenth-century founding English Baptist precedents, such as those professed by Thomas Helwys. Leland’s church-state stance, while not representative of the majority of his coreligionists, did represent an important historical current in Baptist history. As Richard Curry Huff demonstrates, in challenging Hamburger’s position, Leland ultimately chose a “Church-State position that
exceeds
that of Thomas Jefferson’s, erecting such a high wall of separation that it ignores religion’s and especially Christianity’s vital role in the preservation of America’s liberties.” See Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’?,” 5. Huff designates Leland’s position an error. I contend that it was Leland’s absolute separation, following Jefferson, that allowed him to envision a religiously plural and politically equal citizenship for Muslims, Jews, and Catholics as well as all other non-Protestants.

121.
Leland,
Writings
, 356.

122.
Ibid., 358.

123.
Quoted in Butterfield, “John Leland,” 213 n. 32.

124.
Leland,
Writings
, 476.

125.
Ibid., 477.

126.
Ibid., 490.

127.
Ibid. Italics mine.

128.
Ibid., 187.

129.
Ibid., 498.

130.
Ibid., 187.

131.
Ibid., 198.

132.
Ibid., 295.

133.
Ibid., 251.

134.
Ibid., 121.

135.
Ibid., 310.

136.
Ibid., 404.

137.
Ibid., 179; on Leland’s views of Catholics, see Hanson,
Necessary Virtue
, 218.

138.
Leland,
Writings
, 671.

139.
Butterfield, “John Leland,” 233.

140.
Leland,
Writings
, 672.

141.
Ibid., 691.

142.
Ibid., 428.

143.
Ibid., 724.

144.
Ibid., 459.

145.
Ibid., 503.

146.
Ibid., 735.

147.
Ibid., 96–97.

148.
Butterfield, “John Leland,” 182–83.

149.
Leland,
Writings
, 175.

150.
Ibid., 118.

151.
Ibid., 173.

152.
Ibid., 174.

153.
Ibid., 612.

154.
Ibid.; Boland, “Render unto Caesar,” 148–49. Jefferson spoke about the emancipation of slaves, but feared violence or “convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race”; see Jefferson,
Notes on Virginia
, in
Life and Selected Writings
, 238.

155.
Butterfield, “John Leland,” 241.

156.
Quoted in McLoughlin,
New England Dissent
, 2:929. Leland’s position was so extreme that it “bordered upon solipsism,” according to Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’?,” 415.

157.
Quoted in McLoughlin,
New England Dissent
, 2:929.

158.
“In American religion, Leland, not Jefferson, represented the wave of the future,” argues Thomas S. Kidd, but he does not recognize Leland’s consistent insistence on exploding forever a Christian state, political equality for non-Christians, and religious pluralism in this prediction; see Kidd,
God of Liberty
, 208.

1.
Quoted in J. A. I. Champion,
The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1770
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 111.

2.
Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen, 1911; repr. 1974), 5:356 n. 68.

3.
Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801,” in
Thomas Jefferson: Writings
, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 492–93.

4.
Ibid.

5.
Farmer’s Museum or Literary Gazette
(Walpole, NH), January 4, 1803, 4.

6.
Thomas Jefferson,
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson
, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903–7), 10:378.

7.
John Leland,
The Writings of the Late Elder John Leland: Including Some Events of His Life, Written by Himself
, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: G. W. Wood, 1845; repr. La Vergne, TN: Nabu Public Domain Reprints, 2011), 652.

8.
Ibid., 38.

9.
Kathleen M. Moore,
Al-Mughtaribun: American Law and the Transformation of Muslim Life in the United States
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 23.

10.
For the argument that there may be “at least one uninterrupted chain of transmission of Islamic influence from the eighteenth century to the twentieth,” see Michael A. Gomez,
Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 185–200; quote on 186.

11.
Ibid., 185–200.

12.
Ibid., 154.

13.
Quoted in Marilyn C. Baseler,
“Asylum for Mankind”: America, 1607–1800
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 330–31.

14.
Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr,
Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 78.

15.
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri,
A History of Islam in America
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 96.

16.
Ibid., 96, 136.

17.
Ibid., 293; see Jacob Rama Berman,
American Arabesque: Arabs, Islam, and the 19th-Century Imaginary
(New York: New York University Press, 2012), 179–210.

18.
GhaneaBassiri,
History of Islam in America
, 152; quoted in Moore,
Al-Mughtaribun
, 45.

19.
GhaneaBassiri,
History of Islam in America
, 135–64.

20.
Ibid., 96.

21.
Ibid., 141. For other name changes, see Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad,
Not Quite American: The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States
(Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004), 4.

22.
Kevin M. Schultz,
Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 23.

23.
“Transcript of Civil Rights Act (1964),” Section 202,
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=97
.

24.
GhaneaBassiri,
History of Islam in America
, 153.

25.
Ibid., 158.

26.
The idea is GhaneaBassiri’s,
History of Islam in America
, 29–30, 380. For the most nuanced consideration of race as a challenging category for American Muslims, see Sherman A. Jackson, “Muslims, Islam(s), Race and American Islamophobia,” in
Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century
, ed. John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 93–108.

27.
Quoted in GhaneaBassiri,
History of Islam in America
, 159.

28.
Quoted in Schultz,
Tri-Faith America
, 20–21.

29.
Quoted ibid., 18–19; quote on 19.

30.
Quoted ibid., 20.

31.
Bret E. Carroll,
The Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 91.

32.
Quoted in Schultz,
Tri-Faith America
, 22.

33.
Carroll,
Routledge Historical Atlas
, 94. The Jewish population was 150,000 by 1860.

34.
Richard W. Bulliet,
The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 5.

35.
Quoted in Michael Beschloss, “FDR’s Auschwitz Secret,”
Daily Beast
, October 13, 2002,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2002/10/13/fdr-s-auschwitz-secret.html
.

36.
Quoted in Schultz,
Tri-Faith America
, 23.

37.
Ibid., 1–42.

38.
Ibid., 28, 42.

39.
Ibid., 57–58; Bulliet,
Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization
, 6, emphasizes the acceptance of the term by the 1950s.

40.
Bulliet,
Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization
, 6.