solution before 1820. The crusading Baptist preacher Elder John Leland, who returned to his native state after laboring many years in Virginia, championed the Jeffersonian way for Massachusetts. Religion in Virginia and most other states was entirely free of official sanction or support, Leland said, “yet they are not sunk with earthquakes or destroyed with fire and brimstone.” Christian faith, as well as republican principle, demanded the Jeffersonian solution: “According to our best judgments, we cannot pay legal taxes for religious services, descending even to the grade of a chaplain for the legislature. It is disrobing Christianity of her virgin beauty—turning the churches of Christ into creatures of state—and metamorphosing gospel ambassadors to state pensioners.”
Not surprisingly, the religious issue became involved in party politics. In opposing the Federalists, the Republicans appealed to the dissenting sects and necessarily opposed the clerical establishment, which was violently anti-Jeffersonian. The government passed briefly into Republican hands in 1807, and under Governor James Sullivan they endeavored to enact a reform bill. It failed. But the Massachusetts system was rapidly being undermined by dissenter resistance, variant practices in the towns, litigation and court decisions, and, finally, by divisions within the Congregational church itself. In 1811 the legislature passed the Religious Freedom Act, which exempted unincorporated religious societies from the payment of the parish taxes, thereby placing the dissenters on an equality with the Congregationalists in respect to supporting their own ministers. The law ended the annual scramble of the sects, often succeeded by long drawn-out lawsuits, for their shares of parish tax money. Staunch defenders of the third article assailed the law, saying it opened the door to evasion, and they foresaw a flight from the parishes in order to escape payment of religious taxes.
By 1820 the inherent contradictions in the Massachusetts experiment were tearing it apart. To these difficulties were now added those produced by a deep cleavage in the orthodox church. Unitarianism had grown up within that church. Adherents of this milder, rationalistic faith wished ministers of their own persuasion, and so intradenominational disputes between Unitarians and Trinitarians rocked the church already besieged by the host of dissenters. As their following increased in the eastern towns, though still a minority of the faithful in most instances, they seized upon the parish system and by polling majorities in town meetings took over scores of churches, forcing the orthodox to form new societies on a voluntary basis. Thus victimized by the unified town and parish system, many Congregationalists turned against it and lost interest in state-supported religion. The dissenters won some wholly unexpected allies. Culminating two decades of bitter controversy, the courts upheld the Unitarian claims in the case of the Dedham church in December 1820, just as the third article came before the convention in Boston.
The select committee on the declaration of rights recommended several concessions to American opinion and practice, while at the same time preserving the fundamental principle of the third article. Its coverage was extended to Catholics and unincorporated religious societies. The provision empowering the legislature to enjoin attendance at religious worship was stricken. This far the convention agreed to go. In acting on other parts of the constitution, the delegates eliminated the religious test for officeholders and opened the board of overseers of Harvard to ministers of all denominations. However, the convention balked at the recommendation to give constitutional status to the act of 1811 relieving sworn communicants of dissenting sects from the payment of parish taxes. The reformers, of course, wished to go all the way to the voluntary system; a few, very few, would have liked to strike the third article in entirety. They were repeatedly beaten down. The crucial vote came on January 6, 1820, on the substitute resolution, earlier defeated in committee of the whole, sponsored by Henry H. Childs of Pittsfield. After acknowledging the dependence of civil government upon the piety and morality fostered by the public worship of God, the resolution declared that this end is best achieved by leaving every man free to worship as he pleases and therefore that every society of Christians should be equal in the eyes of the law and empowered to support itself. The resolution fell on a record vote of 136 to 246. Only two counties, Bristol and Berkshire, where denominational democracy and religious liberalism were most advanced, gave majorities for the Childs’s substitute (see Table 1.2). The conservatives then beat back an eleventh hour move to graft the 1811 statute on the constitution. Perhaps the most important change in the third article grew out of the Unitarian controversy. This permitted a Congregationalist of one persuasion to have his tax money appropriated to a minister or society of the same persuasion within the denominational fold; in short, a Trinitarian need not support a Unitarian minister. Although Hoar and others, Unitarians for the most part, viewed this clause as a death blow to the establishment, simple justice required it as long as the fiction of one orthodox church persisted in Massachusetts.
Next to religion the most troublesome problem for the delegates was that of representation in the legislature. suffrage, although considered, was a minor issue. Few men otherwise qualified were excluded from the franchise by the constitutional requirement of a freehold worth £60 or productive of an annual income of £3, roughly translated as $200, or $10 (in American currency of 1820). Even this limitation was loosely enforced. Actual practice, if not the law, approximated universal male suffrage. Reformers were more concerned with the expediency than the justice of the requirement. A resolution to abolish it passed by a substantial margin, only then to be reversed when conservatives like Josiah Quincy held up the specter of a propertyless rabble multiplying in the new factory-towns and assailing the liberties and estates of the commonwealth. The convention quickly settled on an amendment extending the suffrage to men qualified by age and residence who also paid any tax to the state or county. This tax-paying qualification merely brought the constitution abreast of prevailing practice.
In accordance with the theory of balanced government and wishing to secure property against the masses, the framers of the Revolutionary constitution had based representation in the house on numbers, in the senate on property, or, to be strictly accurate, on the proportion of taxes paid by the senatorial districts. The select committee on this subject recommended no change. The delegates, in committee of the whole, signified their agreement. Then Henry Dearborn, in a long, impassioned speech—barely summarized in the Journal of Debates—attacked this “aristocratical principle” of property representation in the senate and offered a resolution to base that body on population by districts. Amazingly, the delegates adopted it without debate. When it was pointed out that the resolution was inconsistent with the rest of the report on the legislature branch, the delegates voted to reconsider. For the first time in the convention, the conservatives brought out their big guns against this “subversion of fundamental principle.” John Adams rose in defense of the property basis of the senate, recalling the doctrines of his elaborate Defense of the American Constitutions in 1787. The long speeches of Webster and Story made deep impressions and may, indeed, by sheer power of argument, have reversed the convention’s decision on this question. As Story pointed out, the actual difference between property and numbers was not great, and it was likely to diminish because of the rapid growth of population in the eastern cities, particularly Boston, which paid the largest share of taxes and were, therefore, favored in senatorial representation. Nevertheless, whether viewed in the light of principle or of power, the system was undemocratic. Western delegates could readily demonstrate that while it assigned six senators to Suffolk, it gave the three valley counties, twice as populous, only four. Suffolk and Essex together held one-third of the representation in the senate. The interest of a majority of the delegates clearly supported a senate based upon population, but the majority withered under the conservative counterfire. When the Dearborn resolution came to a vote in the committee of the whole on December 15, it was rejected 164 to 247. It met the same fate later in the convention.
The question of the senate was inseparable from the question of representation in the house. A meaningful balance required that the two chambers of the legislature be based upon different principles that had some logical relationship. If under the revised constitution representatives were to be paid out of the state treasury for the first time—and most delegates agreed they should be—this was further reason for basing the senate on taxes. Moreover, men had generally assumed, quite correctly, that the composition of the house in Massachusetts gave a preponderant representation to the small towns at the expense of the large; and since the report of the legislative committee looked to a continuation of this system, though on a reduced scale, it seemed unjust to expect