The Most Generous, Disinterested, and Philanthropic Motives: Race and the 1826 Maryland Jew Bill

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• The Most Generous, Disinterested, and Philanthropic Motives:Race and the 1826 Maryland Jew Bill¹
• Eric Eisner (bio)

In the early nineteenth century, the Jewish elite in Baltimore grew increasingly frustrated with the official religious discrimination that hindered their political and civic advancement, and the political elite of the state increasingly came to view this species of discrimination as out of step with the spirit of the times. J. W. D. Worthington informed the 1824 session of the Maryland House of Delegates that when Samuel Etting, the son of Solomon Etting, a wealthy Baltimore Jew, wanted to study law, his father, "with pain in his heart and tears in his eyes, told him that he could not."² The Baltimore Patriot reported that a volunteer corps of riflemen elected Benjamin Cohen to be its captain. Cohen could not accept, and the militia company agreed to have no captain and to be commanded by a lieutenant instead.³ Thomas Jefferson appointed Solomon's brother, Reuben Etting, to serve as the United States marshal for the State of Maryland.⁴ But Reuben Etting was not eligible to be a lawyer, a captain in the state militia, a city councilman, or a member of a jury. He was Jewish, and Maryland did not allow Jews to hold government office or positions of public trust.⁵ Worthington, in his speech to the Maryland legislature, asked in indignation, "Is not this an outrage on the age?"⁶

American states redrew the boundaries of political participation in the early nineteenth century. Before independence, most colonies restricted the right to vote and hold office to Christian men who owned [End Page 757] property. The limited egalitarian spirit of the early republic swept away most religious restrictions on suffrage and weakened or eliminated many property requirements, but, as the nineteenth century dawned, property qualifications remained common, and several states continued to impose religious tests for public office. An ideology of White male citizenship advanced the new proposition that race and gender should be the sole determinants of political rights—a change that that politically empowered poor White men and religious minorities at the expense of free Black men with property. Throughout the antebellum period, conservative forces that defended the religious test and the property qualification proved increasingly powerless to stem the tide as the foundations of political rights shifted. The controversies over the property qualification, free Black rights, and the religious test collided dramatically in Maryland, particularly in the years-long and bitterly fought contest over a piece of legislation that supporters and opponents alike referred to as the "Jew Bill."⁷

The 1776 Maryland Constitution required anyone who wanted to hold government office or a position of public trust to declare their belief in the Christian religion. In 1797, Solomon Etting sent the first petition to the Maryland legislature to amend the test, but the effort fizzled.⁸ In 1818, Thomas Kennedy, a Presbyterian state legislator, introduced legislation—the "Jew Bill"—that would allow Jews to hold office. The Jew Bill touched off fierce controversy in Maryland and throughout the country, and it remained an important political issue in Maryland until it became law in 1826. In a speech in favor of the Jew Bill, H. M. [End Page 758] Brackenridge insisted that Kennedy, the champion of the Jews, had only "the most generous, disinterested, and philanthropic motives."⁹

The story of the Jew Bill, however, illustrates the country's tangled moral contradictions more than the altruistic struggle of a great American pulling the nation toward the promise of legal equality. The Jew Bill debate coincided with long-term political developments in Maryland—and much of the country—that increasingly defined political rights as the universal and exclusive province of White men, tearing down property requirements to vote and eroding the rights of free Black men. This ideology of White male citizenship propelled the passage of the Jew Bill.

Historians have produced an extensive and growing literature on the connections between race and religion in America, but their insights have not been brought to bear on the long decline and fall of state religious tests in the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Historians have noted that many nineteenth-century...