After the American Revolution is over, and the United States has won the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the country faces a number of problems with governance and with finance, and some of those problems are going to come to head at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in a few years. But the states are grappling with these issues very early on in the 1780s. Patrick Henry, who's back in the Virginia legislature, is directly involved with a number of these issues in Richmond. I'd like to talk about several key issues that Patrick Henry deals with as a legislator. Now the first one was sort of interesting; one of the questions they faced was what to do with Loyalists? There were thousands of loyalists who had supported the King of England and Britain during the war. Many of them had fled to Britain, Canada; many of them had stayed, but now when the war is over, they're asking to be allowed to come back and be allowed to have their rights, voting rights, own property, participate in business, act as lawyers, that became an issue in New York. And so a debate erupts in the Virginia legislature in 1783 as to what to do with Loyalists. Patrick Henry rises to address the issue and people were a little astonished that Patrick Henry supports the Loyalists. And he explains, he says you know what we really need here in Virginia is population. "People, sir, form the strength, and constitute the wealth of the nation." With Henry's style he responds to the suggestion that the country needed to be afraid, that Virginia needed to be afraid of what these Loyalists, these unloyal people might do if they were made citizens. Henry says, "Afraid of them! -- what, sir, shall we, who have laid the proud British lion at our feet, now be afraid of his whelps?" Henry gets the issue right, that there really isn't any danger from the Loyalists, and Virginia and most of the states decide to allow the Loyalists to participate as full citizens. But there's one issue in which Henry is not soft on the Loyalists, and that relates to the issue of confiscation. During the war, Virginia, and most of the other states, had confiscated a lot of the property owned by Loyalists. They were having difficulty funding the war, finances were collapsing, and it was viewed as a reasonable method to support the war. We're going to talk about that more in the next lecture because Patrick Henry's going to continue to grapple with the issue of confiscation well into the 1790s. A second issue that Henry was involved with in the legislature, he advised that they needed to have a treaty with the Native Americans. One of the problems was basically squatters were going out over the Appalachian Mountains, going into areas that were still owned by Native Americans, had never been purchased or there was no treaty, setting aside that many of the treaties were problematic. But people were squatting on Native American land, and the risk was war; there was war in the 1790s throughout most of the Ohio and Indiana territories. So Henry as a legislator tried to discourage illegal surveying of Indian property. And, interestingly, he introduced a bill, he wanted to have adopted a bill, which would have encouraged inter-marriage between Native Peoples and the citizens of Virginia. He thought this was a good way for the different societies to get to know each other. The Native women would marry Virginia men, or Virginia men would marry Native women. It didn't happen, but Patrick Henry is certainly ahead of his time in the concern that this relentless push of the colonists or now the citizens of the United States for Native territory was not right and was going to be very problematic. So the third issue that Patrick Henry gets very engaged in as a legislator in the post-war period, is the fight over religious freedom. That issue reignites. You may recall that Patrick Henry's very much engaged in the issue of religious freedom both as a lawyer, before the American Revolution, and then also during the constitutional debates in 1776. The issue reignites after the war, but this time Patrick Henry may be on the wrong side of history. You recall that pre-revolutionary Virginia has an established church, the established Church of England; the church is supported by tax dollars. Everybody has to pay taxes to support the Anglican minister, doesn't matter whether you're Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, or Quaker; you pay taxes to support the minister. Now that system had been eliminated, suspended initially, and then eliminated during the Revolutionary War. But during the war, all of the churches had suffered significantly; it's hard to find money to pay your minister when people are fighting the war. It's hard to get people in the pews, so the parishioners aren't there, and the churches had really, not just the Anglican church, had gone into some disarray. So after the war is over, a number of people said that maybe the government needs to be supporting religion again. And we know we can't have the system like we had before the war, where the government picks one denomination and says you're the preferred denomination, you're the official religion. But maybe the government should still do something to support religion, and the idea that was proposed is what is referred to as a general assessment. And the idea was that we will tax everybody but instead of just giving all of the money to the Church of England, we'll ask people: You gave us some tax, who do you want your tax to go to, Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist? You gave us tax dollars, who do you want your money to go to, Presbyterian, Anglican, Quaker? And that we would allocate the money in this manner, and people thought, well that's fair. The government's not picking one religion. But there were several problems. The one is this only applied to Christian religions, so only Christian denominations could get money under the General Assessment proposal. This leads to the suggestion that we often hear today of the United States was a "Christian nation." Well, if this law had been adopted you can argue that, yes, we are a "Christian nation;" we have an official law that says the Christian religions are going to be supported. But the second problem is many people believed the government shouldn't be engaged in religion at all. Shouldn't be involved in religion at all; we should have a separation of church and state. Interestingly once this proposal is made in 1784, and Patrick Henry is one of the leaders of this proposal for a general assessment -- we've talked about his devotion to religion -- and initially with Patrick Henry at the lead, this proposal passes the Virginia House of Delegates. It passes what's referred to as its first reading, and it's voted on affirmatively in the House of Delegates. But once that proposal is out there, opposition begins to percolate up. And the opposition comes from two different directions. Perhaps not surprisingly some Enlightenment thinkers, people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, are very much opposed to this idea. Government shouldn't be engaged in religion; we need a separation of church and state. But in addition, 18th century evangelicals, Baptists and Presbyterians in particular, stand in opposition to this proposal. The Baptists and the Presbyterian evangelicals had both theological as well as political reasons to oppose this kind of system. Theologically, the Baptists in particular, said that people have to make their own commitment to God. And if the government is encouraging you to adopt a particular religion, even if that's simply funding your minister, that's wrong. That you have to make a personal decision, and that's all that God wants. They also had important political reasons to oppose this kind of a system. They had been dissenters under the established church in colonial Virginia; they knew what it was to have government controlling religion. And we would see again and again in their petitions and opposition to the general assessment, that when government and religion unite, it corrupts both. It corrupts government; it corrupts religion. And so they insisted that this general assessment not be adopted. Patrick Henry loses this debate, as I said, the general assessment will be defeated in 1785. And instead, we are going to get, in January of 1786, Thomas Jefferson's Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom. So the end result is a document in Virginia which very clearly requires religious freedom, requires a strict separation of church and state, and in many respects, is going to be the model for the First Amendment in the US Constitution a few years later. People will still argue today about this issue of separation of church and state and "Christian nation," and yet the debate is occurring in Virginia in a microcosm in the mid-1780s. And the courts today often point to Virginia as the real, sort of, the origins of American religious freedom, in this debate that's going on in which Patrick Henry loses. And, instead, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the evangelical Baptist and Presbyterians win as the core for American religious freedom. I talk about this at great length in my second book. Still, having said that, we shouldn't forget Patrick Henry's role on religious freedom. He is very much in favor of broad toleration; he's very much opposed to one church being adopted by the government as an official religion. And his efforts in that regard, and his battle for religious freedom before the American Revolution, certainly is a significant contribution, even though he fails in his efforts to adopt the general assessment. Of course one other thing to keep in mind, this is another cause for tension between Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. This is the mid-1780s, Patrick Henry is the leading proponent of general assessment. And for Thomas Jefferson, the issue of religious freedom and separation of church and state is one of the most important issues for government. And so this is not going to help Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry's relationship.
