Civil Liberties in the Colonies
109
Quakers, and Catholics. But the persecuted, when they have opportunity, sometimes persecute in turn, and so it was in North America until
religious hostilities diminished in the eighteenth century on both sides of
the Atlantic.
By 1763 the congeries of religious sects and denominations had learned
tolerably well how to get along peaceably with one another. The Congregationalists of Massachusetts, for example, had found it necessary to permit Anglicans to settle among them in large numbers; the Quakers of
Pennsylvania had come to terms with the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of
the western regions; Methodist preachers were evangelizing the backwoods and the frontier; the feeble Catholic minority in Maryland and
New Jersey was tolerated; the handful of Jews were not even noticed;
and the Deists, though as few in number as the Jews, had won over some
eminent men, including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John
Adams. Nine of the Thirteen Colonies had established churches in 1763:
the Church of England in Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, Georgia,
and the southern counties of New York; the Congregational Church in
Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts and its dependencies.
‘‘Establishment’’ of a church meant that it was a ‘‘preferred’’ sect that
might enjoy certain economic privileges; it did not mean that other
churches were banned. For the colonial governments were far more tolerant of dissenting churches than were European governments. Sometimes religious minorities were exempted from paying tithes (church
taxes enforced by the public authority); sometimes members of congregations were permitted to pay their tithes directly to the church of their
choice. Such liberality on the part of the state was unknown in much of
Europe at the time.
There was, nonetheless, discrimination against Roman Catholics, Jews,
and even dissenting Protestants, particularly the Baptists, if they refused
to comply with local laws that benefited a preferred sect. For example, colonial governors were instructed not to indulge Catholics in ‘‘liberty of
conscience,’’ because Catholics were regarded as potentially subversive
of the established state and church. On the eve of the Revolution, only in
Pennsylvania could Catholic masses be celebrated publicly. The British
government’s policies in 1763 that seemed to protect the French Catholics
of Canada were especially frowned upon by New Englanders, New York-