RALEIGH – During the 1770s, several dozen of my ancestors – bearing family names such as Coffey, Suddreth, Livingston, Sumter, Barlow, Moody, Fields, and Isbell – left Albemarle County, Virginia to settle in western North Carolina. By 1780 most had ended up in what is now Caldwell County, where my father was born 150 years later.

We can’t know for sure all the factors that contributed to their individual decisions to move to North Carolina. But the available evidence strongly suggests that a desire for religious freedom was a key motivation. Many were newly converted Baptists. They thought they were entitled to religious freedom as a matter of right. The Virginia government thought otherwise.

During the mid-18th century, America had experienced what is now called the first Great Awakening. Charismatic preachers such as the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards and the Methodist George Whitefield pioneered a style of sermon that favored emotional appeals over theological discussions. Their sermons – such as Edwards’ famous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” – were emulated by ministers of many other fields, and were widely disseminated throughout the colonies by the growing ranks of American printers.

Benjamin Franklin, for example, was so taken by George Whitefield’s sermons that he often printed them in full in his Philadelphia Gazette. While Franklin, a Deist, did not share Whitefield’s religious views – Whitefield retained many Calvinist views about predestination, for example – the Philadelphia printer appreciated Whitefield’s call for moral renewal and public service.

During the Great Awakening, many churches began to alter their worship services to emphasize sermons and testimony over ritual and ceremony. Church attendance and membership increased. While virtually all religious denominations in America were affected by the Great Awakening, it was particularly well suited to the growth and development of Baptist and Methodist congregations.

Much of America’s political and religious establishment greeted the Great Awakening with a mixture of bemusement, befuddlement, and alarm. As the new religious fervor led to tensions within the existing denominations and the founding of many new churches, the elites perceived threats both to their own power base and to the shared religious experience they considered to be essential. During the 1750s and 1760s, colonial officials began a new crackdown on religious dissent, especially on Baptists and other communities that opposed official, tax-funded state churches.

No where was the crackdown more evident than in Virginia. The government accused Baptists of child abuse (for not christening their infants) and immorality (for not registering their marriages with the established church). Here are reports from individual Virginia Baptists about how they were treated during the 1760s:

• “Pelted with apples and stone.”
• “Ducked and nearly drowned by 20 men.”
• “Commanded to take a [a drink of whiskey], or be whipped.”
• “Jailed for permitting a man to pray.”
• “Meeting broken up by a mob.”
• “Arrested as a vagabond and schismatic.”
• “Pulled down and hauled about by hair.”
• “Tried to suffocate him with smoke.”
• “Tried to blow him up with gunpowder.”
• “Drunken rowdies put in same cell with him.”
• “Horses ridden over his hearers at jail.”
• “Dragged off stage, kicked, and cuffed about.”
• “Shot with a shotgun.”
• “Ruffians armed with bludgeons beat him.”
• “Severely beaten with a whip.”
• “Whipped severely by the Sheriff.”
• “Hands slashed while preaching.”

Obviously, it took a lot of guts to stick to one’s principles in the face of such risks to life and limb. Still, thousands of Virginia dissidents did just that. Not only did they continue to practice their faith, but they also organized new churches, sent out missionaries, and challenged colonial officials through petitions, lawsuits, and political activity.

One way the Virginia authorities sought to suppress the new religious movements was to insist that ministers obtain a license from the government to preach – and then jail those who either couldn’t or wouldn’t travel to the colonial capital of Williamsburg to obtain it.

In 1768, government officials in Spotsylvania County arrested three Baptists – John Waller, James Childs, and Lewis Craig – for preaching without a license and disturbing the peace. They were imprisoned for 43 days. That didn’t stop Lewis Craig, pastor of the Upper Spotsylvania Church. He preached sermons while still in the Spotsylvania jail. After his release, Lewis Craig continued to expand his own church and helped others get started, as did his brother Elijah Craig, who led the Blue Run Baptist Church in Orange County, just to the west of Spotsylvania.

If you keep moving westward from Spotsylvania through Orange, your next stop is Albemarle County. In the early 1770s, a small group of Albemarle residents began to meet in a barn to hold Baptist services. Rev. Elijah Craig sometimes visited to preach and advised the new congregation. In 1773, some members of the congregation founded their first formal church, Albemarle Baptist Church. Some years later, a second church appeared. It was named Priddy’s Creek Baptist.

The listed founders of Albemarle Baptist included two of my 5th-great grandfathers, Thomas Coffey and Thomas Fields, plus some four dozen other residents, including at least two black members. During its first few years, the church relied on visiting ordained ministers – Lewis Craig, Elijah Craig, and John Waller chief among them – plus elders and deacons recruited from the membership. One was a 6th great-grandfather of mine, Rev. John Barlow.

Interestingly, this Baptist congregation seems to have played a key role in shaping the political and religious ideas of future President Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson grew up in Albemarle County. He later built his famous Monticello estate there, partly on land purchased from another ancestor of mine, Thomas Smith. Jefferson represented the area in the Virginia legislature. He served until 1779, when Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia.

It was during Jefferson’s tenure in the colonial legislature that he first became acquainted with Albemarle Baptist Church, which was located close to Monticello. Although Jefferson was officially an Anglican, and privately a Christian freethinker, he apparently enjoyed an occasional visit to Albemarle Baptist for church services.

According to a story later told by First Lady Dolly Madison, who had it from Jefferson himself, one day Jefferson asked the pastor of the church, Andrew Tribble, to dine with him at Monticello. When Tribble asked Jefferson what he thought of the self-governing structure of Albemarle Baptist, Jefferson replied that it had “struck him with great force” and that “it would be the best plan for government of the American colonies.”

There is no question that the travails of the Albemarle Baptists and other religious dissenters during the 1760s and 1770s had a strong impression on Jefferson, his friend James Madison, and other young Virginians. Madison, in fact, had personally witnessed the persecution of Baptists in the Virginia Piedmont.

After consulting with Rev. Elijah Craig, among others, Madison and Jefferson came to believe that the legislature should put explicit protections of religious liberty into Virginia law. In 1777, Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of his bill for Religious Freedom. After additional tinkering, he introduced the bill in 1779.

It didn’t pass at first, but Madison and other allies continued to push the idea. Finally, in 1786, the General Assembly approved Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Among other provisions, it read:

[T]o compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical…

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

While Lewis Craig, Elijah Craig, and their Baptist colleagues in Albemarle County had significantly influenced the drafting of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom, they weren’t around to see it enacted. Tired of waiting for the government to end its oppression of them, they left Virginia for less-oppressive climes. For example, in the early 1780s the Craig brothers led their Baptist congregations west to settle in Kentucky. (Somewhat improbably, given his faith, Elijah Craig later built a distillery and essentially invented the bourbon whiskey industry of Kentucky.)

Even before that, however, much of the Albemarle Baptist congregation had already sought their freedom in a different direction – moving southward to the North Carolina mountains. They left an impressive legacy behind them. Now it was time to create another.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.