What Would Jefferson Do?

Posted on by Jason Coleman

May 2 is National Prayer Day. John Ragosta, author of Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, penned the following thoughts at the outset of the day and has shared them with us.

Today marks the official National Day of Prayer. Republicans and Democrats across the nation will soon sit down to meetings and meals bookended with an opening and closing prayer. Certainly there is much to pray for: action on global climate change, fiscal responsibility, justice for immigrants, wisdom, humility, and peace.

Yet with the National Day of Prayer, we inevitably witness another festival: the debate between those demanding its end in the name of separation of church and state, and others who will complain that government is censoring prayers in the name of political correctness. Upon what might be a welcome bipartisan interlude, shrill voices intrude.

Having spent time studying religious freedom at Monticello’s International Center for Jefferson Studies, I inevitably come back to the following question: What would Jefferson do? How would he react to a National Day of Prayer mandated by Congress and proclaimed by the President?

Several years ago, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled the official Day of Prayer unconstitutional (before the case was thrown out for lack of standing). Judge Crabb was clear: the problem is not prayer, or even prayer by government officials; rather, the issue is government seeking to use prayer for political purposes, literally taking what is sacred and making it profane. Judge Crabb quoted the Supreme Court: “in the hands of government what might begin as a tolerant expression of religious views may end in a policy to indoctrinate and coerce.” This echoed James Madison’s admonition almost two hundred years earlier that official prayer proclamations “seem to imply and certainly nourish the erronious [sic] idea of a national religion.” It was for this reason that Jefferson emphatically rejected any “official,” government call to prayer. Not only did Jefferson see government prayer proclamations as unconstitutional, but he added: “I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct it’s exercises . . . Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. . . . Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them . . . and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.” Jefferson undoubtedly would join Judge Crabb in insisting that prayer should not be government-directed or sponsored. Jefferson’s concern for mixing government and religion was both political and theological. Politically, government support of religion threatened “tyranny over the mind,” a country led by “priestcraft.” Theologically, Jefferson would have agreed with eighteenth century evangelicals, equally committed to strict separation of church and state, who understood that even government encouragement interfered with a “free will offering” to God, a wholly-voluntary decision to believe and pray.

To stop there, though, is to miss an important part of Jefferson’s learning. In both of his inaugural addresses, Jefferson invoked divine guidance. Some, ignoring his emphatic declaration to the contrary, insist that Jefferson supported official prayer. Others accuse Jefferson of inconsistency, saying that prayer proclamations which he insisted were unconstitutional and his inaugural prayers were “indistinguishable.” Jefferson did not see it that way. An official proclamation of a day of prayer is a government act – subject to the constraints of the First Amendment; a private prayer, even when made by a public official in a public setting, is not. Madison made a similar point when he concluded that an official congressional chaplain was unconstitutional, but Members of Congress, acting in their private capacity, could certainly gather to pray: “If Religion consist in voluntary acts of individuals . . . and it be proper that public functionaries, as well as their Constituents should discharge their religious duties, let them like their Constituents, do so at their own expense.” What they should not seek is government endorsement or funding for their prayers.Thus, Christian ministers rightly object that government should not tell them to omit Jesus’ name from their prayers, but that is the result of being officially-sponsored. Eighteenth century evangelicals rejected government assistance for this reason, recognizing that it would be “the first link which Draws after it a chain of horrid consequences, and that by Degrees it will terminate in who shall preach, when they shall preach, where they shall preach, and what they shall preach.”

Jefferson was a prayerful man, but he rejected as both inappropriate and dangerous government intrusion into the sacred realm. So, what would Jefferson do? Paul advised to “pray ceaselessly,” but he certainly did not ask the government to sponsor his prayer meetings. Jefferson would agree.

Adams Papers: Three new volumes in ROTUNDA

Posted on by David Sewell

We have released three new digital editions of volumes from the Adams Papers project (sponsored by the Massachusetts Historical Society and published by Harvard University Press) in Rotunda’s Adams Papers Digital Edition. As for previously released volumes in the Adams Papers, we include the full textual content of the letterpress volumes and all graphics for which permission is available, and a hyperlinked version of the indexes for each volume.

New in this release, and added to all previous volumes of the Adams Papers Digital Edition, are mouseover expansions of all of the Adams family code abbreviations used in the edition (such as AA2 for Abigail Adams [1765–1813], daughter of John and Abigail).

Adams Family Correspondence, volume 8, drawing from nearly 250 letters, follows the Adams family from March 1787 to the close of 1789. The correspondence covered in this volume evokes a period of transition both for both the nation and the Adams family. John Adams made the transition from the first Minister to the Court of St. James to first Vice President of the United States under the new Constitution, after only a brief respite at their newly acquired farm in Quincy, which John Adams named Peacefield. Meanwhile, their daughter Nabby, married in 1786, gave birth to John and Abigail’s first grandchildren, and their sons, John Quincy, Charles, and Thomas Boylston, furthered their studies at Harvard and embarked on their own legal careers.

Volume 9 of the Adams Family Correspondence chronicles the early years of the American republic under the new Constitution with Vice President John Adams faithfully presiding over the Senate. Internationally, the United States faced diplomatic challenges as the outbreak of the French Revolution raised questions about the position and response the nation should take in regard to both France and Europe in general. On the domestic front, all of the Adams children completed their transition to adulthood, with the youngest son, Thomas Boylston, graduating from Harvard. The correspondence of the children, both among themselves and to their parents, takes center stage in this volume of nearly 300 letters spanning from January 1790 to December 1793 and reveals not only their sentiments on national and world events, but also the intimate details of family and farm.

The 350 letters of The Papers of John Adams, volume 14, explore the slow and difficult diplomatic conclusion to the American Revolutionary War from October 1782 to May 1783. Wary of France’s motives and desirous of establishing a fully independent way, John Adams and the American Peace Commissioners determined to strike a peace with Great Britain separate from France, but issues ranging from loyalists to fishing rights slowed progress. Meanwhile, Adams continued his role as minister to the Netherlands overseeing the distribution of funds of the Dutch-American loan, followed fifteen-year-old John Quincy’s long journey from St. Petersburg to The Hague, and took a keen interest in how best to write an accurate history of the American Revolution. As always, Adams’s letters reveal a wealth of insight into not only the history of the period but his own thought processes.

(UVA Press wishes to thank Sara Sikes of the Adams Papers, and her staff, for assistance with proofreading of the digital volumes.)

Dolley Madison Digital Edition: 300 New Documents

Posted on by David Sewell

Our Dolley Madison Digital Edition, edited by Holly C. Shulman, has been updated with 300 new documents, 360 additional identifications of people, places, and terms, and six new editorial essays exploring aspects of Dolley’s life during her widowhood in the 1840s.

This latest installment of the DMDE takes the reader through 1844 and the sale of Montpelier, the Madisons’ estate in Orange County, Virginia. In 1844 Dolley finally realized that her debts (and those of her son, John Payne Todd) had become too great for her to continue running the property; her only choice was to sell. This she did to a Richmond merchant with local family connections, Henry Wood Moncure. After 1844 Dolley would never again return to Virginia. As of this installment the reader has now twenty editorial essays on topics ranging from the enslaved community at Montpelier to the nineteenth-century “autographomania” that led collectors to seek out James and Dolley Madison’s signatures. Among the new biographical identifications are entries on nearly twenty members of the Montpelier slave community. Also new are three high-resolution images of Montpelier survey plats from the Orange County Courthouse that accompany an editorial essay by Ann L. Miller.

The images in the gallery below are scans of plats based on surveys in preparation for the sale of the Montpelier estate. The largest plat, covering two pages, includes the entire plantation and immediate surroundings.

Forthcoming installments of the DMDE will focus on Dolley’s life after her return to Washington, DC, locally honored and publicly feted, while privately still struggling to keep herself financially afloat.

Number 42

Posted on by Jason Coleman

With the release this week of the Jackie Robinson biopic 42, we asked Bruce Adelson to contribute a few comments. Adelson’s Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor League Baseball in the American South documented many of the challenges that African American ball players faced, and overcame, in a society still practicing racial segregation.

The debut of the new movie 42 reminds us of a time when America was segregated, riven by racial differences, stereotypes, and violence. In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers placed Jackie Robinson front and center for our country to debate a bold new step in race relations. His color-barrier-shattering achievements reached far beyond the baseball fields of New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. Robinson’s efforts opened a new chapter for Americans, bringing us closer to what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. later described as “the beloved community,” a community where integration and tolerance were the watchwords.

Jackie Robinson may have ended Major League Baseball’s color barrier, but in baseball’s minor-league towns throughout the South, both the law and rigid customs barred black men and white men from playing America’s national pastime together. And yet it was here—in places like Danville, Virginia, Hot Springs, Arkansas, Savannah, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama—that the next stage of America’s integration was to play out, in the years following Robinson’s ascendency.

“I tend to refer to us as Jackie’s disciples,” explained former big leaguer Ed Charles in Brushing Back Jim Crow. “We spent years and years trying to make breakthroughs down in the South. We were carrying his torch a little further. We all tried to emulate Jackie. All the guys patterned themselves after Jackie. They may have gotten to the point where they wanted to quit and they just thought about Jackie. I know I did.”

Ed Charles weathered many storms during his professional baseball tutelage in the South’s minor leagues where he played eight years in places like Corpus Christi, Louisville, and Jacksonville. Charles was often the first black man whom people had ever seen playing baseball on the same field with white ballplayers. Charles and his compatriots endured segregation, racial taunts, and almost ceaseless racial hostility, all while trying to learn their baseball crafts and follow in Jackie Robinson’s footsteps to the Major Leagues.

A teenaged Henry Aaron broke the color line in Jacksonville, Florida. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, Aaron was well-acquainted with the Jim Crow South. He understood what he must endure on the ballfields of Charleston, Savannah, and Columbia, South Carolina, while a visiting player for Jacksonville. Aaron, like so many of his fellow line breakers, used the racial invective and segregation he experienced and turned it around, like hitting a high fastball and sending it screaming into the bleachers.

“Believe it or not,” Aaron explained in his interview for Brushing Back Jim Crow, “at night, you laugh about it. That’s one thing that made you go out the next day and say, ‘I can’t believe that people are this ignorant.’ And go out and do better. It was a motivator.”

Aaron’s is only one of the remarkable stories from this dramatic time in sports history. Brushing Back Jim Crow also recounts the successes and disappointments of such greats as Billy Williams, Felipe Alou, Chuck Harmon, Nat Peeples, Al Israel, Willie Tasby, Ed Charles, Don Buford.

As we enjoy 42 and celebrate Jackie Robinson’s achievements, let us also tip our caps to Jackie’s disciples, the men who broke the color barrier down South. As Congressman John Lewis explains in Brushing Back Jim Crow, baseball integration “helped to open and liberate people from stereotypes and attitudes. It broke down walls. It ended those feelings that somehow people could not be together. It had a profound effect on southerners. It was more than race relations. It was just pure human relations.”

The Story of a False Story

Posted on by Jason Coleman

Donald McCaig, author of the just-published Mr. and Mrs. Dog, has been contributing a series of pieces on a little sheepdog named Fly. In this latest piece, McCaig indulges in a little dog psychology—always a perilous undertaking with someone who may be smarter than you. McCaig followers will want to know that Mrs. and Mrs. Dog has just been reviewed in the Washington Post. Read the review here.

This is the story of a false story.

We live and sometimes die for our stories; some benign (“God is Love,”"All Men are Created Equal”) others not (“lebensraum,”"separate but equal”). Among the false stories doggers tell are: “Registries don’t ruin breeds, breeders ruin breeds,” “Corrections are cruel,” and “Dogs offer unconditional love.”

We all have stories about our own dogs who are “natural outrunners” or who are “kind to their sheep” or “reliable around kids” or who “suffer from separation anxiety.” Some of these stories are true, others false.  Whichever, they color our expectations and the dogs’. They direct our training.

Last weekend Fly and I attended a Patrick Shannahan clinic in Maryland. Patrick is a fine, gentle teacher, and I learned from him, but my important discovery came watching a dog—not my own—trained by another trainer.

Backstory: when I bought Fly, Beverly Lambert told me a story about Fly and a Scottish trial man. Fly’s crate is her safe place and when she wouldn’t come out, her brand-new owner dragged her out and Fly bit him. Whereupon he got “harsh” with Fly and she responded by refusing to work for him. Period. A fully trained three-year-old open-trial winner gave up her career—not for everyone, Bev worked her, but she never worked for the Scot again.

Bev said something like, “You don’t see many Border Collies who’ll stand up for their rights.”

Good story. Dog is mistreated and removes the punchpowl. Brave Fly! The Defiant One!

When Fly came to me, she was a Wild Child and she wouldn’t work sheep. Period. Finally I tricked her into working and we’ve gone on from there. But Fly’s story was always: The Defiant One. Never mind in 30 years I’ve never seen one of these Defiants; never mind that while The Defiant One may lurk in some terrier genetic codes, it isn’t anything a Border Collie breeder would breed for. Never mind that she wouldn’t work for me—although I HADN’T dragged her out of the crate nor abused her. Fly had her story and I was sticking with it!

Backstory 2: After I’d had her six months we ran at Joanie Swanke’s in the Dakotas. Joanie’s outrun was four to five hundred yards blind through sagebrush on three range yearlings. You couldn’t see the work very well, and the three wild sheep broke 1-2, or 1-1-1 or broke back to the letout or over the ridge out of sight in a very big prairie.  One dog went missing and was recovered trying to fetch an antelope. It was very difficult work—so difficult that Tommy Wilson and Sly took twelve minutes to get the ewes to his feet. Tommy is a far, far better trainer/handler than I am.

Fly didn’t really want to outrun and disappeared at a lope. Since I couldn’t see I didn’t say anything, and directly she was behind her sheep, just a dot, and I couldn’t see well enough to read the pressure so stayed mum. As they moved past the letout, I couldn’t see well enough to command. I didn’t say anything until they were at the fetch panels. It was, the judge told me, the best outwork of the day, and the memory of it kept me going with Fly when good sense said quit. This story was “Dog so talented she could handle difficult work w/o help.”

Last weekend, both stories changed. Fly’s pup Rose was at the clinic, and she was her Mama’s daughter. If Rose had any genes from her sire, they weren’t on display. It was like seeing Basic Fly—absent all Fly’s training, work, and life experience.

Rose hated stress, and the balance point between necessary training corrections and losing her was unusually delicate—and that point shifted up and down the scale.

Linda Tesdahl had been training Rose for a year, and we watched while her owner and Patrick worked. Rose, like her Mama, is a piece of work. Talented but . . .er . . .

At the end, Rose was on sheep a hundred feet from her handler’s feet when he said, “That’ll do, Rose.” And Rose came off happily and straight to his feet! Which, in my experience, is really weird. Unless something really awful has happened, well started young Border Collies don’t want to/won’t come off their sheep. “Do you mean it?  Ah, you don’t really, really mean it! Just a minute more. I’ve come back partway, is that far enough? Don’t you want to send me again?”  We’ve all seen it. I said how odd Rose’s willingness to quit was, and Linda said, “She’s coming off stress.” Which was my Aha! Because 500 yards from me, Fly is perfectly willing to come off her sheep–just like her daughter. And both hate stress.

Story: Fly is thumped. Defies the man who thumped her by removing the thing (sheepwork) he cares about most. Great story. But impossible. How would Fly connect the thumping with working sheep? Even if she did, why would she later refuse to work for me?

So what’s the more likely story? If I were writing it, I’d continue after the thumping. We have a still angry handler. HANDLERS DON’T GET BIT! Fly is now chained in the stall. But the handler wants to end on a good note. He unclips Fly and takes her out to his training sheep, intending to get a brief gather and fetch, say, “Good Lass” and put her up. But he’s still angry and maybe she picks up on that and hesitates and he gets on her again—verbally this time—and Fly’s doggy mind is spinning and she shuts down hard. And stays shut down. In a brand new home with no anti-stress reserves (affection, safe routine) she shuts down. And Fly has learned that shutting down (like coming off sheep) removes the stress she hates.

No, its not as good a story (no movie sale), but it is more likely to be true.

So why’d she do so good on those range sheep?

Because she did it on her own—no handler commanding her. The most difficult sheep are much less stressful than her handler’s demands.

I’ll want to keep that in mind.