Background
John Leland, the son of James and Lucy (Warren) Leland and a descendant of Henry Leland who came to America in 1652, was born at Grafton, Massachussets.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
John Leland
Edit ProfileEducation
His early education was limited to the elementary training of the common schools.
Career
At eighteen, having received "a sign from God, " Leland decided to forsake worldly pleasures and devote himself to the ministry. In 1774, he obtained a Baptist preacher's license, and two years later, he started for Virginia. There, after a temporary ministerial assignment at Mount Poney, he established himself at Orange. He ministered there until 1791. He was nominated by the Baptists of Orange County as a delegate to the Virginia convention of 1788, to oppose the Constitution. Convinced by his opponent, James Madison, that the federal instrument would not interfere with religious freedom, he campaigned for his rival, who was consequently elected.
On August 8, 1789, at a meeting of the Baptist General Committee at Richmond, Leland proposed the abolition of slavery. Taking an active part in the revival of 1787, he was regarded as one of the most popular preachers in the "Old Dominion. " His Virginia Chronicle (1790) added to his renown, since it became the basis of R. B. Semple's History of the Rise and Progress of the Baptists in Virginia (1810).
In 1791, Leland moved to Cheshire, Massachussets, where he resided for fifty years. In his native commonwealth, as well as in Connecticut, he fought diligently for the complete disestablishment of the Congregational Standing Order. As leader of the Connecticut Baptists, in his tract Van Tromp (1806), he suggested that a constitutional convention be called to adopt a new organic instrument providing for religious liberty. Twelve years later his suggestion was adopted.
When a constitutional convention was held in his own state in 1820, Leland in his Short Essays on Government, published that year, proposed an amendment to separate church and state. In 1833, his hopes were realized with the final overthrow of the Congregational system in Massachusetts. An advocate of political as well as religious liberalism, he was at first a Jeffersonian Republican and later a Jacksonian Democrat. Enthusiastic over the election of Jefferson, in 1801 he traveled to Washington to present his hero with an enormous cheese, made by the women of Cheshire. For this incident he was dubbed the "Mammoth Priest. "
In 1811, he was elected on the Republican ticket to the Massachusetts legislature. Although engaged in these temporal pursuits, during his fifty-year abode in Massachusetts he took an active part in missionary work, in defending the Christian revelation against deism, and in composing popular hymns. In 1838 he published Some Events in the Life of John Leland, Written by Himself. When he was eighty-three, death claimed his wife, the mother of his nine children. Three years later he was buried by her side in the cemetery of Cheshire.
Achievements
Connections
Leland married Sarah Divine on September 30, 1776.
