The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. As part of this, I’m writing monthly columns about the politics of the era, written the same way I’d write them today. The events described here took place in October 1776. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter here:
Virginia’s legislature has convened for the first time since independence was declared this summer. If legislators thought they would be focused entirely on wartime matters, they were mistaken.
From across Virginia, but especially its western counties, petitions have flooded into Williamsburg beseeching legislators to carry out a different kind of revolution — this one against the church.
Virginia’s population of those who don’t adhere to the Church of England — more commonly known as the Anglican Church — has long chafed at the requirement that we must all pay taxes to support the official church. It hasn’t always been dissenters who have resented these taxes. Our governor, Patrick Henry, first came to fame as the lawyer in a case known as the Parson’s Cause, where a Hanover County jury took out its ire against the church by awarding the Anglican minister James Maury just a single penny in a dispute over back wages.
Nonetheless, the church has remained as an official government institution, and dissenters have often found themselves attacked in vicious ways. The most infamous is the case of John Waller, a Baptist preacher. He was dragged from a pulpit in Hanover County by his hair. Waller was forcibly removed from another pulpit in Caroline County and whipped 20 times by the sheriff, who left the minister in “a gore of blood.” Remarkably, Waller went back to the pulpit.
Waller has been in and out of court — Henry defended him in one Spotsylvania County case. Several times, he’s wound up in a jail in Middlesex County, once in solitary confinement, another time fed only bread and water. When Waller was caught preaching again, he was pelted with stones. By some accounts, Waller has spent 113 days in four different Virginia jails, yet remained undeterred. He often preached through the bars of his cell, and authorities were forced to disperse the crowds that gathered outside to hear him.
Waller’s crime? His refusal to obtain a license to preach the gospel and his insistence on preaching in a different style and manner from the official church.
Should this even be a crime? This is now a matter for our new Virginia General Assembly.
Perhaps our legislators should have expected this. If we are going to declare ourselves free of the king, how can we retain the king’s church as an official act of government?
There are philosophical questions aplenty here. Our revolutionary convention in June, at the behest of George Mason of Fairfax County, passed a Declaration of Rights, which included the “free exercise of religion.” What, exactly, does that “free exercise” mean? Perhaps we all might agree that means dissenting clergy have a right to preach — but must they still obtain a license? Must they still pay a tax to support a church to which they don’t belong? Will they be allowed to perform marriages, a rite now restricted to Anglican ministers?
While these are weighty questions, there is a weighty practical consideration, as well. We are now at war and we need every able-bodied man available who can shoulder a musket. How can we appeal to these dissenters (mostly Baptists but also Presbyterians and Methodists, among others) to support the cause of American liberty if that liberty does not fully encompass them?
It’s reputed that Benjamin Franklin has said of the 13 Colonies now in revolt that “we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Whether he truly said that or not is immaterial; the point is the words apply here.
One petition coming into Williamsburg is said to contain the names of 10,000 men, so many that its pages have been sewn together to keep them intact.
That petition is much like the one being circulated in Albemarle and Amherst counties, which calls on legislators to disentangle Virginia from the Anglican Church and “to put every religious denomination on an equal footing, to be supported by themselves independent one of another.”
To throw off the crown and an official church in the same year? That would truly be revolutionary.
