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: