Mercy Otis Warren was among the first writers of the Revolutionary period to define the struggle against Britain as a fight against tyranny. Before Thomas Paine wrote “Common Sense” or Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, Warren helped lay the groundwork by framing the conflict in stirring, dramatic terms. In a series of plays published in the early 1770s, she captivated the reading public by elevating their personal grievances with British rule by using classical tropes and symbolic language.

Warren witnessed growing British power early and up close, and she came to believe that the showdown between the colonists and the British officials who ruled them was no self-interested squabble over taxes. It was instead a fundamental clash between freedom and oppression, with roots going back to the Roman republic. Her plays persuaded many other colonists to see it the same way.

For Warren, this was no intellectual exercise. She and her family had been feuding with Thomas Hutchinson since the mid-1750s, more than a decade before anyone was even thinking of revolution. At that time, when Warren was in her 20s, she had no idea that the colonies would eventually fight to leave the British Empire. She was proud to live in the most powerful, most profitable and what many white colonists saw as the freest empire in the world.

She and her beloved husband, a merchant and politician named James Warren, could afford silk, satin, lace and ribbons for her dresses and imported cheese and wine for their table. James and others in Warren’s family — her brother and her father, both named James Otis — were men of consequence who held positions in the Massachusetts colonial government. Raised in the culture of British New England in Barnstable, Mass., Warren was given the rare chance to be tutored, alongside her brothers, and taught to wield a pen. For the Warrens and the Otises, it was good to be British.

But while the empire made Warren’s comfortable life possible, she and her family hit what we might call a colonial glass ceiling. They blamed Hutchinson. In 1757, Hutchinson, then a member of the Governor’s Council, lobbied against her father’s appointment to the same group. Three years later, the governor appointed Hutchinson as chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court, adding to a baffling number of appointments that Hutchinson also racked up, eventually including lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.

In 1761, Warren’s brother, James Otis Jr. — known as Jemmy — argued a case before the Massachusetts Superior Court challenging customs officers’ ability to board ships to search for smuggled goods, saying that the practice violated the British Constitution and the colonial rights to due process. As lieutenant governor, Hutchinson enforced the laws at issue in the case; as chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court, he was also the judge. His predictable decision against Otis and the Boston merchants seemed a clear sign of the corruption not only of Hutchinson but also of the relationship between the British government and its colonies.

By 1770, unrest over Parliament’s restrictive policies from the past decade — including the Sugar, Stamp and Declaratory Acts — had spilled out into the streets. That year, five townspeople were killed in the Boston Massacre. King George III, rather than removing Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson over the disaster, promoted him to permanent governor with orders to crack down on the city.

Warren was determined not only to emphasize Hutchinson’s fatal flaws — she later wrote that he “was dark, intriguing, insinuating, haughty and ambitious, while the extreme of avarice marked each feature of his character” — but also to awaken her fellow colonists to the British government’s tyrannical creep. She wrote “The Adulateur” in 1772 and used blank verse, with its iambic pentameter, to make Rapatio’s lines seem to drive toward an inexorable conclusion. The meter makes him not just bad but almost unstoppable as he soliloquizes about his tyrannical ambitions:

Despotic rule my first, my sov’reign wish;

Yet to succeed beyond my sanguine hope,

To quench the gen’rous flame, the ardent love

Of liberty in Servia’s freeborn sons,

Destroy their boasted rights, and mark them slaves.

Even though Warren published the play anonymously, it must have been thrilling for her to see her own words printed — not in the fine cursive of a lady’s handwriting but in the bold type usually reserved for men, with their news of politics and war and their companies’ advertisements for the latest goods from London. Still, she wrote to her friend Hannah Winthrop, she didn’t intend for “The Adulateur” to catch fire the way it did. She had been writing only “to give pleasure to a little circle of very valuable friends” and “never entertained so chimerical an idea as to suppose it in my power greatly to amuse — much less to benefit the world.”

It didn’t take long for leaders of Massachusetts’s rising rebellion to figure out that the author was the wife of their friend James Warren of Plymouth. In December 1773, after the clandestine political group known as the Sons of Liberty dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor, John Adams wrote to James Warren, asking him to “make my Compliments to Mrs. Warren” and urge her to fight for the cause. Adams hoped that she would write a poem praising the Boston Tea Party: “I wish to See a late glorious Event Celebrated by a certain poetical Pen,” Adams wrote, “which has no equal that I know of in this Country.”

Warren’s works were extraordinary in more ways than one — for being written by a woman and helping push the colonies toward revolution. After the war, Warren would stay true to her belief that the new American government shouldn’t reproduce the old tyrannies of the British, nor should it leave room for the development of new ones. She never abandoned what she saw as her readers’ “ardent love of liberty,” as her first play put it, which she knew was essential to the Revolution in its day — and something that has been central to the American conversation ever since. This commitment to liberty would lead her to oppose the original Constitution, pitting herself against many founding fathers in the process.

The person who most influenced Warren’s political formation was her brilliant older brother, Jemmy. He was known for his passionate defenses of liberty, which he distributed in the political pamphlets he wrote, and for his impetuosity — John Adams called him “a flame of fire.” Back in 1761, Jemmy won a seat in the Massachusetts Assembly and spent many nights with his sister and brother-in-law at their home in Plymouth, which was on the road between the Otis family home in Barnstable and the Assembly in Boston.

In the years before the war, Jemmy also helped attract other frequent visitors, including both John and Samuel Adams, who would help form the Sons of Liberty. Their first steps toward revolution took place on the wooden floors of the Warrens’ living room. At first, Warren might have only listened to the men debating as she poured tea or bent over needlework, but soon she was part of the conversations. After all, she had read the same philosophy and history books that they had. She freely expressed her opinions, as she later wrote to John Adams, “at a Certain Fire side, where many Political plans were Laid, Discussed, and Digested.”

Jemmy’s name might have become as famous as those of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. But some sort of mental illness came upon him in his 40s. He shouted inappropriate and often incomprehensible insults and got in fights. At first, people thought it was just his hot temper and heavy drinking. But by 1771, he was declared mentally incompetent and moved to his parents’ house in Barnstable. Growing up together, the siblings had been taught that women were as intellectually capable as men, yet Warren had never planned to write for anyone beyond family and friends. Now she believed that the movement had lost its best defender. She took up her brother’s pen.

The Warrens and the Sons of Liberty wanted to stoke the revolutionary spirit. What started in Boston had broadened to the rest of Massachusetts, but they needed to reach the other British colonies, too. Through newly devised Committees of Correspondence — small groups in each town and county that spread news, coordinated action and enforced the boycotts of British goods — they distributed a bombshell in 1773: a damning trove of Hutchinson’s letters that Benjamin Franklin had received from an anonymous source, in which Hutchinson mused that the government might need to crack down on colonists’ liberties. The letters made their way to the Warren home, where the Warrens and the Adamses decided that this was the chance to lay bare the British plot against liberty. Once leaked, the letters were read aloud in the Massachusetts Assembly, published in newspapers and spread through the committees. “The duplicity of Mr. Hutchinson,” Warren wrote, was “laid open,” and “debates and animosities ran high.” The Assembly began to draw up articles of impeachment against Hutchinson.

Warren began churning out more work, goading her readers to see that “government and legislation were instituted for the benefit of society at large, not for the emolument of a few.” When men like Hutchinson seized too much power, she wrote, it was the people’s “indispensable duty to resist.” And while still anonymous, she wanted to control her work. After someone added to her scenes that ran in The Massachusetts Spy and published a full-length version — in what she justifiably deemed a “plagiary” — Warren wrote an expanded set of scenes for a new play. She published this work as “The Defeat” in The Boston Gazette and Country Journal. One of the “Virtuous Senators” of Warren’s imagined state, Servia, asks in a rhymed couplet:

Shall Servia bleed, and shan’t her sons complain,

While traitors revel o’er her children slain?

The Virtuous Senators together bring about Rapatio’s downfall, as the play’s title predicts. Abigail Adams, John’s wife, praised the play that “so throughly look’d thro the Deeds of Men, and Develloped the Dark designs of a Rapatio Soul.”

After watching the revolutionary ideas she wove into her writing explode throughout the colonies, Warren no longer questioned whether to publish her writing. The poem she wrote praising the Boston Tea Party at John Adams’s request appeared on the front page of The Boston Gazette in early 1774. She wrote another play in early 1775 called “The Group,” which was reprinted in newspapers in New York and Philadelphia. It brutally mocked loyalists as sycophants; it urged colonists who were still on the fence to stand behind Massachusetts, which was suffering under occupation by thousands of British troops and the forced closure of the port of Boston. (The play was so successful that, after the Revolution, a man claimed that he had written it, and Warren had to ask John Adams to publicly spread the word that he knew that she was the true author.)

All people of sense, Warren implied in her writings, were repelled by tyranny, whether that of a violent husband, a cruel slave owner, a power-seizing official or a government that stripped the people of their self-rule. She warned that tyrants should beware: Those on the side of liberty were “resolv’d to die, or see their country free.” As the war started, James Warren became the paymaster of the Continental Army. The colonies went to war, and his wife often traveled to meet him.

Throughout the war, when she wasn’t at her desk or visiting her husband, Warren ran the family farm. Like many Revolutionary wives, she would sometimes move herself and the children to be closer to wherever he needed to be. But she kept up correspondences with the influential people she had hosted in her living room, and after the war she continued to play a central role in Americans’ discussions about how to, as Thomas Paine put it, “begin the world over again.”

Winning independence did not end Warren’s worries about tyranny. In fact, she feared that the new nation’s leaders might forget the Revolution and, in their triumph, blindly recreate a new form of oppressive government. If toppling British control was worth fighting for, reinstituting tyranny with their newfound independence would be heartbreaking.

In 1787, the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to draft a new governing document to replace the weak Articles of Confederation. Warren wrote that she was alarmed that no press was allowed in to observe the proceedings, “lest their consultations and debates should be viewed by the scrutinizing eye of a free people.” Based on scattered reports she heard from Philadelphia, the men writing the document were recreating tyranny by drafting a Constitution that neglected to mention freedom of the press, ordered elections to be held too infrequently and created a standing army, which would remain a threat to the populace.

In response, Warren published “Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions, By a Columbian Patriot” — a work that lambasted “the secret transactions of the convention at Philadelphia.” Behind those closed doors, she charged, a Constitution had been drafted that concentrated power over the states and the people. Was this any different from what had allowed Hutchinson to reign over Massachusetts? She criticized the delegates for not including “a bill of rights to guard against the dangerous encroachments of power,” especially on individual rights. Many of the states’ own constitutions written during the Revolution included this kind of list of protections, and Warren knew that without one for the burgeoning nation, the union could drift into a homegrown version of the British tyranny it had just defeated.

In response to criticism from Warren and others, James Madison and other framers promised that one of the new Congress’s first acts would be to protect individual liberties. Congress indeed passed a series of amendments that were ratified in 1791 and became known as the Bill of Rights. As Warren wrote, Americans could now be more confident that the ideals of the Revolution would persist — and that “the government of the United States stood on a basis which rendered the people respectable abroad and safe at home.”

Since declaring independence, Americans have continued to argue over the right balance between liberty and order. While Alexander Hamilton believed that a republic could never be accused of tyranny — because it represented the will of the people — Warren knew that tyranny could come from many places, including the elected officials we choose to represent us. Liberty can always be taken away, even from within a democracy.

Warren’s defense of liberty and distrust of the powerful has become a recurring part of the American conversation. The Bill of Rights, and the court systems that evolved to protect those rights, proved essential to defending countless Americans over the centuries, including journalists, people accused of crimes and those using the rights of free speech and assembly. In our lifetimes, activists from the Tea Party of the late 2000s to today’s No Kings movement have echoed her ideas: Americans must always be attuned to the concentration of power and the possibility of, as Warren put it, “uncontrouled despotism.” She was always on the side of liberty.

And yet Warren herself has been almost forgotten. There have been a few biographies, including the excellent “A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution,” by Rosemarie Zagarri, a historian at George Mason University. But general histories, whether popular accounts of famous revolutionaries or academic analyses of the war’s causes and consequences, mention Warren in a sentence or two, if at all, and almost never as a mover of early Revolutionary thought and action.

In 1790, at age 61, Warren finally published under her own name. It was a collection of poems and plays, some previously published anonymously; unlike her prior work, she was able to register the book’s copyright under Congress’s new copyright law, one of the few instances in which, as a woman, she could legally own property. Alexander Hamilton wrote to congratulate her: “In the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the Male.”

She also wrote one of the first histories of the Revolution. The book begins with an explanation of why a woman was the right person to write it. “At a period when every manly arm was occupied, and every trait of talent or activity engaged, either in the cabinet or the field,” she wrote, “many circumstances might escape the more busy and active members of society.” Busy with the work of war, men might not have taken in or had the time to jot down all the events “that flowed in quick succession.” Only a woman — and only a woman in the United States with an education, living and publishing in the heart of the Revolution’s action — could write the detailed history from personal experience that the country deserved.

Perhaps a woman, too, was best positioned to observe the fragile nature of liberty, the obligation to constantly protect it and the need of never taking it for granted. As with all wars, the Revolution had tremendous consequences for colonial women, who saw their homes and lives overturned. They had opinions about how societies should run, when they should go to war and when they should make peace. And Mercy Otis Warren wrote hers down.

The robust, if perpetually contested, religious freedom that Americans enjoy today is one of the most important legacies of our founding. Thomas Jefferson and other revolutionaries like James Madison fought to separate the church from the state. As men of the Enlightenment, they were skeptical of dogma and prized the human mind’s capacity to reason. But they confined their trust to the reason of wealthy, educated men. Leland, too, believed in reason, but he drew that belief from a major tenet of the Reformation: that ordinary men and women had the capacity to interpret God’s will for themselves.

Self-taught and rough-edged, Leland traveled constantly, giving thousands of sermons and baptizing more than 1,500 people over the course of his life. By his own calculations, he logged enough miles to circle the globe four times. Born into a Congregational family in central Massachusetts in 1754, Leland had only a basic education, but he read voraciously. He was deeply moved by a series of evangelical revivals then sweeping through the colonies, known as the Great Awakening, which in turn reanimated a core notion of the Reformation: that individual conscience, illuminated by God and Scripture, is the ultimate authority in matters of faith. As explained by the likes of popular revivalist preachers like George Whitefield, those who sincerely accounted and repented their sins could experience conversion and be reborn. Thereafter, God’s spirit entered the body, offering not only the promise of salvation but also a measure of divine guidance — or “new light.”

This growing New Lights movement spoke especially to those outside the colonial gentry, like Leland, who saw little need for clergy or other authorities to tell them how to relate to God. The more radical among them felt emboldened to raise questions about established authority that went beyond matters of faith and into the realm of politics. Baptists, in particular, insisted on congregational autonomy and, fiercely protective of individual conscience, strongly opposed any state establishment of religion.

Leland studied the Bible closely and concluded that infant baptism was not only wrong but tyrannical, because it bound children to the church without their consent. When he was 20, he joined the Separate Baptists, who reserved baptism only for converted believers. Like many other self-educated converts, he almost immediately set out as an itinerant preacher on an eight-month sojourn through Virginia. It was there, working hundreds of miles to the south as an eager “volunteer for Christ,” that he had the experiences that solidified for him the importance of religious liberty.

Leland first arrived in Virginia in 1775, as independence seemed increasingly inevitable and people were debating the meaning of liberty and the role of ordinary people in government. As he made his way across the state, on horseback or on foot, word began to spread about the genial and charismatic speaker. New Light preachers were known for using everyday language to connect with their audiences, and Leland was also renowned for his humor.

New Lights met on an egalitarian footing, addressing one another as “brother” and “sister,” washing one another’s feet and exchanging the kiss of charity. They denounced wealth and pride and rejected popular pastimes like horse racing, cockfighting and dancing. Rather than spend Sunday morning sitting in pews arranged by social importance, awakened Protestants attended noisy, emotional gatherings on any day of the week, often outdoors. Their ministers did not read scholarly sermons on intricate doctrine but preached from the heart, extemporaneously.

Roughly 40 percent of Virginia’s population was enslaved, and many worshiped Allah or their own deities. White settlers from New England and the Mid-Atlantic had also been moving to the Virginia backcountry for decades, and many of them, carrying the religious fervor of the Great Awakening, were eager to hear from New Light ministers. Standing on tobacco barrels or crude stages near courthouses, crossroads and ferry landings, itinerants like Leland attracted large crowds of supporters and curious onlookers.

Across the colonies, enemies of the Great Awakening harassed dissenters with legal penalties and mob violence; nowhere was persecution more intense than in Virginia. On his preaching tours, Leland would have heard stories about the violence from earlier years and seen firsthand that much of it continued. Opponents frequently harassed or even attacked the preachers and their listeners.

The hostility toward New Lights came not from London, which had granted colonists the limited protections of the Act of Toleration. Rather, it was Virginia’s gentry, the grandees of the established Anglican Church, who used their control of the county courts and the House of Burgesses to contain the evangelical challenge. Most political offices were open only to members of the Church of England, and residents faced fines for failing to attend Anglican services. Dissenters, like everyone else, had to pay vestry taxes for the salaries of Anglican ministers, even as their own ministers and meeting houses were subject to costly licenses. Only Anglican ministers could legally marry people.

This was no kind of freedom. Leland and many Virginia Baptists increasingly came to see the patriot cause as much a battle for freedom from establishment religion as it was freedom from the Crown.

The question of religious freedom came to a head the following year, in 1776. Most of the 13 colonies had established churches. How would any union of states address those establishments? Would they embrace religious freedom in the face of revolution? And what would that religious freedom look like?

As states formed new governments, they took divergent paths. Some, like New York, did away with a state-supported church. A few others retained an established church but allowed people to designate which denomination to support with their taxes. Some declined to establish a particular denomination but nonetheless supported a small core of Protestant churches with public money or required religious tests for office.

In Virginia, the campaign for religious freedom proved especially intense and consequential. The state adopted a Declaration of Rights to guide its government, which included language declaring that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion,” but remained silent on the status of the Anglican Church, which continued to draw on taxpayer funds. It quickly became clear that most members of the new Virginia Assembly interpreted the language as guaranteeing only tolerance within the established order. For reformers, this was not nearly enough.

“The liberty I contend for, is more than toleration,” Leland would later write. “The very idea of toleration, is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest, to grant indulgence; whereas, all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”

The need for military recruits to fight in the War of Independence forced Virginia’s reluctant lawmakers to accommodate evangelicals who explicitly linked their support for the cause of liberty — and their willingness to fight — to ending what some Baptist preachers called “ecclesiastical tyranny.” The evangelicals flooded the Assembly with petitions calling for the disestablishment of the official church. One Baptist-led petition drew an astounding 10,000 signatures, spread across 125 pages and stitched together into one continuous roll. This, along with pressure by legislative allies like Jefferson and Madison, got them some concessions: The Assembly repealed taxes that paid Anglican ministers and allowed ministers from other denominations to marry people. But convinced that religion was key to social order, it voted down complete disestablishment and full religious freedom.

The victory at Yorktown, Va., in October 1781 ended the war, but the battle over religious establishment continued. By 1784, the Virginia Assembly had revived a bill for a general tax to fund Anglican ministers — who were now called Episcopalians after severing their ties with the Church of England. Taxpayers would be forced to pay church taxes but could choose their own denomination.

While many dissenters agreed to that compromise, Leland and his fellow radical Baptists rejected any state involvement in religion. Liberty of conscience was “inalienable,” in Leland’s view, so “the legitimate powers of government extend only to punish men for working ill to their neighbors, and no way affect the rights of conscience.” Convinced that any preacher paid by the government turned from “a Gospel ambassador” into “a minister of state,” Leland helped lead a successful Baptist petition drive that doomed the legislation.

Instead, in 1786, Virginia passed Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, a direct precursor to the First Amendment and one of three achievements, along with writing the Declaration of Independence and establishing the University of Virginia, that Jefferson saw fit to have memorialized on his tombstone. One historian called it “the mother of all church-state separation statutes.” The act decreed that people could not be compelled to attend or support a church against their will, and it asserted freedom of religion as a natural right. What Leland and his fellow Baptists had fought for in Virginia since before the Revolution had finally come to pass.

Virginia had embraced religious freedom, but Leland’s work was by no means finished. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention, meeting in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation, instead produced an entirely new system of government. The new Constitution had to be ratified by nine of the 13 states to become law. Supporters and opponents, known as Federalists and Anti-Federalists, squared off.

Leland was against the proposed Constitution, largely on the basis that religious liberty was not “sufficiently secured.” While the Constitution, unlike many state charters, imposed no religious test for office, it also did not explicitly forbid a religious establishment. It was “very dangerous,” Leland warned, to leave religious liberty up to “the Mildness of Administration,” rather than building a “Constitutional Defence.” Doubtful that state bills of rights could compensate for the Constitution’s silence on fundamental liberties, he joined the calls for a federal bill of rights.

Leland had by then developed a large following, and his views were influential in Virginia, where Baptists constituted a formidable voting bloc. When Madison, a Federalist, decided in early 1788 to run for election to Virginia’s Ratifying Convention, he courted Leland at the urging of his political advisers, who warned him that Leland, having “much weight with the people,” was against the new Constitution. They urged Madison to meet with him. He most likely did, and it is equally likely that he assured Leland he would protect religious freedom.

With Leland’s support, Madison was elected to represent Virginia at the Convention. His vote contributed to the narrow margin that made Virginia the 10th — and by far the largest and most influential — state to ratify the Constitution. The following February, in 1789, Madison sought election to the first session of Congress, charged with putting the new Constitution into effect. To allay Baptist fears over religious liberty, Madison pledged to introduce a bill of rights. Once again, Leland helped swing the election in Madison’s favor, though he was modest in his warm letter of congratulation. “If my Undertaking in the Cause conduced Nothing else towards it,” he wrote, “it certainly gave Mr. Madison one Vote.”

In Congress, Madison dutifully pressed for a bill of rights. His 20 proposals became 12 amendments, 10 of which the states ratified. Virginia cast the decisive vote in December 1791. Added to the end of the Constitution, they became the Bill of Rights, limiting the powers of the federal government and guaranteeing individual civil and procedural rights. The First Amendment stipulated that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Leland reportedly wrote Madison that the Baptists were “entirely satisfied.”

Leland continued his work for years, but even as other evangelicals began to enter the establishment, he remained an outsider. In 1792, he moved his family to the small town of Cheshire in western Massachusetts, where he continued to argue for the complete disestablishment of the church at the state level.

If modern Americans have heard of Leland at all, it is usually in connection with the “mammoth cheese.” In July 1801, Leland suggested that the farm women of his Baptist community in western Massachusetts produce what he would bill as “the greatest cheese in America — for the greatest man in America.” The cheese was a gift for Thomas Jefferson, Leland’s hero as a champion of religious freedom and republicanism, who was narrowly elected in 1800 to the presidency. The women responded with zeal, producing a monstrous wheel of cheese that required the milk of 900 cows, weighed 1,235 pounds and measured more than four feet in diameter. They decorated the top with the third president’s personal seal: “Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God.”

Leland transported the cheese from Cheshire to Washington by sleigh, sloop and wagon, preaching along the way to enthusiastic crowds keen to hear the “mammoth priest.” On New Year’s Day in 1802, Jefferson personally accepted the cheese and had it displayed in the East Room of the White House, where it remained for at least a year until, according to one account, it became a maggot-filled mess that was dumped into the Potomac.

Two days after presenting the cheese, Leland preached to Congress at Jefferson’s invitation. A Federalist congressman from Massachusetts named Manasseh Cutler, who was also a Congregational minister, judged the colorful cleric “a poor ignorant, illiterate, clownish creature” who preached in typical evangelical style — he “bawled with stunning voice, horrid tone, frightful grimaces, and extravagant gestures.” Cutler claimed that “shame or laughter appeared in every countenance.”

In his condescension, Cutler betrayed his fears about religious populism and the young nation’s future. Nearly powerless in the 18th century, evangelicals went on to become a force in the 19th century, providing ordinary Americans with their own unique voices in religion and politics. Freed from state control, evangelicals flourished in a competitive religious marketplace, honing the populist techniques — mass preaching, moral crusades, political mobilization — that would continue to define American politics to the current day.

Leland helped make evangelicals’ triumph possible, but he increasingly disagreed with them. As they became more mainstream in the decades after the Revolution, it seemed to Leland that they began to mimic the establishment they had once fought. They forgot their previous struggles for religious freedom and instead promoted sabbath laws and denounced Catholicism. Leland objected to their emphasis on building institutional power, which seemed to him more concerned with fleecing common Americans than saving their souls. Evangelicalism, Leland feared, was turning its back on poor, self-educated, self-supporting itinerants like him.

Back in 1802, on the same New Year’s Day that Leland delivered his mammoth cheese, Jefferson forged a line that would echo far beyond its moment, shaping legal arguments and appearing in Supreme Court opinions as if part of the Constitution itself. Writing to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut to explain his reluctance to proclaim public days of fasting and thanksgiving, Jefferson observed that the First Amendment’s establishment clause had “built a wall of separation between Church and State.”

Scholars and jurists continue to disagree over the meaning of Jefferson’s metaphor. Did he merely mean that everyone should be able to worship as they wished without discrimination or partiality, or something more?

For Leland, the problem was not merely favoritism among Christian sects; it was the very notion of a “Christian Commonwealth,” a notion that in his view should be “exploded.” He certainly believed that evangelical Christianity was the surest way to God. Yet, echoing the language of Jefferson’s Virginia statute, Leland proclaimed that all should be free to worship “either one God, three Gods, no God, or twenty Gods.” It was precisely such convictions about spiritual independence that led Leland to yoke his pulpit to political activism. “Let Christianity operate in its own natural channel,” he wrote, “and it is a blessing of immense worth, but turn it into a principle of state policy, it fosters pride, hypocrisy and the worst kind of cruelty.”

Leland died in 1841 at 86, eight years after Massachusetts — the last holdout among the states with official churches — disestablished the Congregationalists. Like his hero Thomas Jefferson, Leland composed his own epitaph. And like Jefferson, he noted his fight for religious liberty, commemorating his 67-year “labor to promote piety, and vindicate the civil and religious rights of all men.”