Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

Jefferson and Madison both worked on a House committee in Richmond that handled the flood of petitions from dissenters. Jefferson later wrote that the barrage precipitated the “severest contests in which I have ever been engaged.” And no wonder: the signatures on the Ten Thousand Name petition alone probably represented more than 10 percent of Virginia’s white male population.14 Virginia legislators could not afford to ignore these kinds of popular grievances. They had a war to fight. So in December 1776, the assembly exempted Baptists and other non-Anglicans from paying required tithes to support the Anglican Church. Moreover, it suspended the establishment tax altogether, a policy Virginia maintained until the war’s conclusion. Some of the Anglican Church’s privileges remained, and the state would consider resuming tithes for a “general assessment” for religion in 1784, a modified establishment that would still mandate that Virginians pay a religious tax, but the taxpayer could choose which church would receive it. In the meantime, Virginia’s dissenters had pressured the state into granting considerable relief, cleverly using their loyal service in the war to make progress toward liberty of conscience.