Mr. Jefferson, a mammoth cheese, and the "wall of separation between church and state": A bicentennial commemoration.

Two hundred years ago this New Year's Day, residents in the Federal City witnessed an extraordinary spectacle unlike any witnessed before or since in the capital city famed for its political showmen and ceremony. With great fanfare, President Thomas Jefferson received at the new executive mansion a "mammoth cheese," a gift from a small Baptist community in western Massachusetts, which made the cheese to celebrate Jefferson's election and commemorate his devotion to religious liberty. On the same day, 1 January 1802, Mr. Jefferson penned an address to a Baptist association in Connecticut in which he said the First Amendment built "a wall of separation between church and state." Today, this architectural metaphor is accepted by many Americans, including jurists, as a pithy description of the constitutionally prescribed church-state arrangement. This essay commemorates these two events, rich in symbolism: one is all but forgotten and the other continues to inform church-state discourse and policy.

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On New Year's Day, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson received a gift of mythic proportions. Amid great fanfare, a "mammoth" Cheshire cheese was delivered to the president's House by the itinerant Baptist preacher and political gadfly John Leland (1754-1841). It measured more than four feet in diameter, thirteen feet in circumference, and seventeen inches in height; once cured, it weighed 1,235 pounds. According to eyewitnesses, its crust was painted red and emblazoned with Jefferson's favorite motto: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." (1)

The colossal cheese was made under Leland's direction by the predominantly Baptist and staunchly Republican citizens of Cheshire, a small farming community in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. It symbolized political support among New England's religious dissenters for Jeffersonian Republicanism, the new administration in Washington, and the president's celebrated defense of religious liberty. Cheshire, according to local lore and extant electoral records, voted unanimously for Jefferson in the election of 1800. (Tradition has it that, with Leland's guidance, Cheshire's conversion to Jeffersonian Republicanism was so thorough that when the first lone Federalist ballot was cast in the village, it was summarily thrown out because the selectmen were sure it was a mistake.) (2) The cheese-makers of Cheshire were both a religious and a political minority subject to legal discrimination in a commonwealth dominated by a Congregationalist-Federalist establishment. (3)

The idea for making a giant cheese to celebrate Jefferson's election (and, perhaps, to market Cheshire's chief agricultural commodity) (4) was announced from the pulpit by Leland and enthusiastically endorsed by his congregation. Much preparation and material was required for such a monumental project. Organizers had to calculate the quantity of available milk and instruct housewives on how to prepare and season the curds uniformly and to guard against contamination. No ordinary cheese press could accommodate a cheese of such gargantuan dimensions, so a modified "cyder" press with a reinforced hoop was constructed. On the morning of 20 July 1801, the devout Baptist families of Cheshire, in their finest Sunday frocks, turned out with pails and tubs of curd for a day of thanksgiving, hymn-singing, and cheese pressing at the centrally located Farm of Elisha Brown, Jr. The cheese was distilled from the single day's milk production of nine hundred or more "Republican" cows. (Since this was a gift for Mr. Jefferson, the new Republican president, the milk of "Federalist" cows was scrupulously excluded. Many months later, when the cheese began to spoil, Leland purportedly explained the decay by saying that undoubtedly the curds of one or two Federalist cows found their way into and contaminated the cheese.) (5)

The month-long procession bearing the giant cheese to Washington attracted enormous public attention. Large crowds turned out all along the route to witness the spectacle. The cheese was transported down the eastern seaboard by sloop and sleigh, arriving in the Federal City on the evening of 29 December in a "waggon drawn by six horses." (6) (By the time it reached Baltimore, one wag reported, the ripening cheese, now nearly six months removed from the cows, was strong enough to walk the remaining distance to Washington.) (7) The "Mammoth Priest," as the press dubbed Leland, recounted that "all the way there and on my return" to Massachusetts he frequently paused to preach to "large congregations" of curious onlookers. (8) The popular press covered the trek to Washington extensively, and, as newspapers of the day often had partisan Federalist or Republican affiliation, the mammoth cheese was either ridiculed or praised respectively." (9)

In one of the most curious spectacles witnessed in the nation's capital, Jefferson personally received the cheese on New Year's morning. The Washington press corps reported that the cheese was conveyed down Pennsylvania Avenue on a dray drawn by two horses. The president, dressed in his customary black suit and respectable "Republican" shoes, stood in the White House doorway, arms outstretched, eagerly awaiting the cheese's arrival. (10) The gift was received with an exchange of cordial expressions of mutual admiration and gratitude and exuberant cheese tasting. (11) The cheese-makers heralded their creation as "the greatest cheese in America, for the greatest man in America." In an address accompanying the cheese, a committee of Cheshire citizens wrote:

 
   [W]e console ourselves, that the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, who raises 
   up men to achieve great events, has raised up a JEFFERSON for this critical 
   day, to defend Republicanism and baffle all arts of Aristocracy. 
 
   Sir we have attempted to prove our love to our President, not in words 
   alone, but in deeds and truth. With this address, we send you a CHEESE ... 
   as a pepper-corn of the esteem which we bear to our Chief Magistrate, and 
   as a sacrifice to Republicanism. It is not the last stone in the Bastile 
   [sic], nor is it of any great consequence as an article of worth, but as 
   [a] free-will offering, we hope it will be received. 

The cheese was bestowed, said the Cheshire citizens, "as a pepper-corn of the esteem which we bear to our chief magistrate," as a "mite into the scale of Democracy." (12) (A peppercorn is a token or something trivial offered in return for a favor.)

The president and the eccentric parson had crossed paths before. Leland was an unrefined, self-educated preacher-farmer. He was an ardent individualist and staunch democrat who throughout his adult life admired Jefferson's devotion to democratic principles and the rights of conscience. Although a native New Englander, Leland spent nearly fifteen years as an itinerant preacher in central Virginia, where he emerged a leader among the commonwealth's Baptists. He was instrumental in allying evangelical Baptists with Jefferson and Madison in the bitter Virginia struggle to disestablish the Anglican Church and secure freedom for religious dissenters. In 1791, Leland returned to New England where he fought arduously and successfully for disestablishment and religious liberty in Connecticut and Massachusetts. According to L. H. Butterfield, Leland "was as courageous and resourceful a champion of the rights of conscience as America has produced." (13) The Baptist parson was effusive in his praise for the new president. Upon receiving news of Jefferson's election, Leland enthused:

 
   This exertion of the American genius, has brought forth the Man of the 
   People, the defender of the fights of man and the fights of conscience, to 
   fill the chair of state.... Pardon me, my hearers, if I am over-warm. I 
   lived in Virginia fourteen years. The beneficent influence of my hero was 
   too generally felt to leave me a stoic. What may we not expect, under the 
   auspices of heaven, while JEFFERSON presides, with Madison in state by his 
   side. Now the greatest orbit in America is occupied by the brightest orb. 
   (14) 

(In an episode strikingly reminiscent of, if not inspired by, the Leland spectacle, in 1835 a Jacksonian partisan from Oswego County, New York made a 1,400 pound cheddar cheese four feet in diameter and two feet thick. A team of twenty-four gray horses drew the wagon, draped in bunting, which carried the behemoth on a triumphant 300-mile journey to Washington where it was ceremoniously presented to President Andrew Jackson, Jefferson's political heir. The "Jackson cheese" cured for nearly two years in the White House vestibule. At a raucous levee on Washington's birthday in 1837, in the twilight of Jackson's administration, (15) the president threw open the White House doors to all citizens to sample the prodigious cheese. A Jacksonian mob descended on the executive mansion and "demolished the mammoth cheddar within two hours and left only a few scraps to grace the presidential table.") (16)

Before it was fully cured, Leland's mammoth cheese had been woven into New England folktales and legends. It was also irresistible fodder for political pundits and satirists, who memorialized it in doggerel verse and satirical scribblings. The verse in particular was printed and reprinted in newspapers up and down the Atlantic seaboard. One humorist playfully suggested that the president would relish the cheese more if there was a "Mammoth Apple Pye" to accompany it. (17) A Republican bard commemorated the episode in a widely circulated "Ode":

 
   Most…